Dusk in Autumn (Atlanta Burns Again, Act III)
by Aldenata
Summary: Part 3 of 4. Atlanta is fallen but the war continues. As alien conquerors consolidate their territory and drive the Georgia Militia further into the countryside, a new alliance may help turn the tide in favour of the resistance. Features canon characters (finally), rebel skitters (of course), and a guest chapter by Thresher. Takes place before and during Season 2. 63% complete.
1. Prologue

_Hear the patter of running feet _  
_It's the old First Cav in full retreat _  
_They're moving on; _  
_they'll soon be gone_  
\- Bugout Boogie, banned ballad from the Korean War

* * *

**8 August, 2011**  
**Atlanta, Georgia, USA**

Crickets sang a matins as the sunrise brought another sweltering day to the banks of the Chattahoochee River, where several thousand militamen were once again waiting, more-or-less patiently, for a chance to reach "safety" on the other side.

The underwater bridges had been an ingenious concept. It was something some of the older engineers had learned from various Asian communists; a more-or-less standard bridge built about a foot below the surface of the water. Hard to see from the air and even harder to destroy, it did have it's shortcomings: there weren't many of them, draft animals and some humans had mixed opinions about the whole affair, trucks had to be careful as they waded through the fast-moving and higher-than-expected water, and more than a few had to be towed across when the drivers overestimated their fording depth. Much of the militia would have to be ferried across. Some of the braver men—or those who feared skitters more than they feared drowning—chose to swim for it.

Captain Jackson Hall pondered the presence of all that muddy water as he directed the remnants of his company down a side-road off Fulton Industrial Boulevard. Certainly no one liked the idea of intractable obstacles placed between themselves and wherever they wished to go, but there were some advantages to a slowed retreat. Militia in retreat were notorious for disappearing completely (not that regulars were much better) and the delay in their run did give their heads a chance to catch up with their feet.

That wasn't necessarily a good thing. What was it the pacifists and generals alike used to say? A rational army would run away… certainly he wanted to.

At least they weren't being bombed. The roof of every factory and warehouse seemed to sport at least one machine gun position, many 14.5mm and bigger. Enough to keep them safe from all but the worst air raid. Unless the enemy did something unusual it seemed likely that…

High and to the south, the metalic bluish glint was almost imperceptible against the hazy morning sky. Catching a glimpse of it, Jack noticed several of them rising up like faint fireworks... Or rockets… Oh no…

He yelled out an incoming as he dove for cover.

* * *

Half a mile away, Kate urged her horse onward while Colleen, riding double, fired her Colt 9mm SMG  
at the oncoming skitters. The line of space invaders broke under the depleted squad of horsemen, some skewered on sabers, crushed by hammers and stomped beneath their hooves.

The big American Quarter Horse bounded over the pavement and weaved between dead cars as if unencumbered by the saddle, two riders, their weapons and equipment. He was reaching speeds that would never be matched in the hazard-strewn city under normal conditions. His little herbivore brain couldn't correlate what was going on around him, but nature and training both told him to run away; demons were chasing him.

They were running through the vanguard of a heavy alien ground force moving down Boulder Park Drive and Bakers Ferry Road. Skitters charged forward to overrun the evacuation points while the bulk of the mechs held back to bombard them, something they had learned from the humans. They were never designed for use as mobile artillery and weren't very good at it, but a sufficient number of mechs firing a sufficient number of missiles and rockets could be guaranteed to cause some damage.

5th Brigade had tasked the 11th Georgia and 4th Alabama Regiment to hold this area before withdrawing to Douglas County, and the 11th Georgia Regiment had tasked the Atmarga Cavalry Column with screening and delaying possible enemy approaches. Easier said than done; the approaches to the Chattahoochee had been a gentle terrain of cotton and conifer before it had been vinyl and aluminum; nice farmland, but not inherently defensible.

Gunfire stitched the pursuing skitters as the horsemen came into range of an antitank rifle position and slowed their mounts behind it. It was just a shallow scrape in the ground fortified with sandbags and slabs of slate. It wouldn't last too long against heavy gunfire, but hopefully it wouldn't have to.

* * *

They didn't quite notice the plumes of smoke coming from the direction of the mechs who had for some reason stopped chasing them. They did notice the pillars of blue-tinged fire coming from where the units packed against the Chattahoochee must have been, and started to wonder if maybe they hadn't drawn the short straw when they had been assigned screening duty.

"Run into trouble?" called a one-armed sergeant, the apparent gun commander.

"Yeah, and not just crabs." said Sergeant Gardener "Something weird about those chicken walkers; they're moving faster."

"You serious? How much faster?"

"Making 45 miles easy on straightaways!" interjected Kate.  
"I think they're getting smarter too, trying to fire… uh 'hull down'." added Colleen. The young girl, already a hardened veteran soldier, would probably never live to see a working tank again, and wasn't confident on the terminology.

"New models, you think?"

That would be a problem. Skitters could keep up with horses in bad terrain, and now it looked like mechs could keep up with them in good terrain. Cavalry seldom directly charged their enemies if they wanted to live; they preferred to use their speed for transport and fight on foot as light infantry. But if the enemy was closing the speed gap, where did that leave them?

"Yup" said the sergeant. He cast a glance at the big 20mm Solothorn S18/100 and could only hope that it would still work. If it can still hit them then it should still kill them. Should.

Great, they all thought; now we'll have to start calling them ostrich walkers.


	2. Chapter 1: Xenos (by Thresher)

**Combat Outpost Drake**  
**Scotch Ridge, Iowa **  
**8 August, 2011**

"What the hell has the spiders so riled up?"

Corporal Samantha Pennington pulled herself up and into the lumber-reinforced and sandbag-protected lookout tower, formerly the steeple of Scotch Ridge United Presbyterian Church and now the primary observation post for Combat Outpost Drake. The COP – currently the home of Second Platoon, 122nd Infantry Company (Motorized) – actually had nothing to do with the well-known liberal arts university that had once anchored an entire neighborhood on the north side of Des Moines, but was instead named after a science fiction author from Iowa. The man had apparently been born in Dubuque, fought in Vietnam, gone to law school, then settled down to write science fiction, most of which had an explicit military bent, and much of which involved aliens.

Entirely appropriate to name a combat outpost after the man, given that Iowa was currently fighting for its life against, and partially occupied by, actual alien invaders. Last anyone had heard of him, he was living in the Carolinas, enjoying retirement and still writing when the Espheni ships had descended over American cities. Colonel Nixon – "the Old Man" to everyone in the 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment – was apparently something of a geek, and had taken to naming every other combat outpost in Warren County after his favorite science fiction authors.

All this was far from the front of Corporal Pennington's mind as she settled into the lookout tower next to Private First Class Francisco Sanchez, her assistant team leader and lucky bastard who had watch in the cool of the morning on what was going to be a sweltering August day. His lookout duty partner, battle buddy, and little brother, Private Hector Sanchez, had wormed out of the cramped lookout to allow their fire team leader to take his place.

She was glad he had. The skies over Des Moines were lousy with alien fighter-bombers. Their crescent shaped, otherworldly forms were lazily drawing circles over the occupied city of Des Moines barely ten miles to the north, and the formation was absolutely _huge_. Corporal Pennington hadn't seen anything like it since those first terrible days of the war last year. Just after Christmas, when the alien mother ships had ended their eerily silent stillness over Des Moines and disgorged hundreds of such attack craft to rain death and destruction across Iowa and America as a whole. What the pros in the Hawkeye Regiment called "fast-movers" or "fast air," as if they were the Russian Sukhois or MiGs many of them had trained to deal with when they'd been members of the Iowa Army National Guard or US Army regulars, had flattened Des Moines International with a massive… _something_… that had left the airport and its squadron of National Guard F-16Cs a shallow, glassy crater. She dearly wished Iowa had some of those fighters left, but they, like so much else that made up America's former military might, were a long distant memory.

"How many do you make those, Corporal?"

Pennington's mind raced, eyes drinking in the sight. "Over a hundred," she breathed. "Look, there! More coming up, in twos and threes." She fought down the bile and terror, forcing back the memories of I-35 southbound out of Des Moines when the fighters had strafed and bombed the highway packed with thousands fleeing the capital. She'd just been "Sam" Pennington then. Just an Army washout with a bad leg and a two year old son from a tryst with a fellow MP at Fort Jackson, she had watched in terror from a tree line a mile away as minivans and cars crumpled under the invisible hammer of laser fire and bright blue plasma turned people into winking torches that ran a little ways and then stopped…

She'd been too far away to hear the screams, but _oh God_ they'd been in her dreams every night since. That three-mile stretch of I-35 had become known, and would probably always be known now, as the Highway of Death. It was barely fifteen miles from her parent's property in the farm country just north of 92. She went there every couple of months, whenever she had leave, on horseback to remind herself why sticking with the 12th Iowa as a volunteer, instead of having babies like every other woman her age, was the right thing to do…

So her son could drive the little county blacktops and state highways, through the countryside of his home state, without being burned alive in his truck. To ensure this, she was now Corporal Pennington, Team Leader of Fire Team Bravo, Second Squad, Second Platoon, 122nd Infantry Company (Motorized), 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment. And it looked to Corporal Pennington like the war had started back up after the long summer lull.

"Hector." She cleared her throat. The call had come out as a broken whisper. That wasn't good enough. "Hector! Get down to the barracks and kick Lieutenant Haldane out of his rack. He needs to see this." She heard him scramble out of his position on the little platform just below the lookout and heard the ladder creak as he climbed down it. The position had been occupied, reinforced, and rebuilt enough that the pews had been removed from the sanctuary and replaced with proper sleeping quarters. It was roomy enough that everyone got a cot and a little space to call their own, which was a luxury for a combat outpost on the edge of enemy territory. At the moment, at least half the platoon were in those cots, sleeping before the planned afternoon patrol up to the North River.

She cleared her throat again. "Hand me the optics, Private. I need to glass the floodplain." The optics were repurposed civilian equipment, of course, like nearly all their gear. Only the "professionals" in the Hawkeye Regiment, the 1st Iowa Mechanized Infantry Regiment, got first dibs on pre-war military-grade equipment. Some of it made its way to regiments like the 12th Infantry, along with new production that was just starting to really come online from the dozens of little factories, and hundreds of smaller workshops, scattered around the State. Her BDU pants were newly made, though stitched from materials spun pre-war. The pair of daggers she wore, one on either hip, were freshly forged from steel recovered from the thousands of dead cars on every roadway across the State. The combat load of ammunition she wore, three hundred rounds of 5.56mm armor piercing, came straight from the new ammo plant near Chariton.

But the optics weren't new, nor military-grade. The telescope was a Celestron 70mm, an older bird-watching model, donated by the wife of the pastor that used to preach at Scotch Ridge United Presbyterian. She had still lived with her husband in the little ranch house right next to the church, barely fifty yards away, through all the insanity of winter and spring. The pair of them had provided material help, prayer, and teachings of faith to refugee, soldier, and militia alike. That is, until a rare maximum power plasma blast from an alien walker had gouged the house out of the wooded hillside, with them inside, back in April. Sam really thought they should have named the COP after them. Whether with God or not, Sam wasn't so sure about such things anymore, people that good and faithful needed to be remembered.

Corporal Pennington held the eyepiece up and peered at the floodplain below. The trees on the reverse slope leading down to the North River had grown quite a bit over the summer, shooting up despite the fires and blast damage from the fighting that had rolled south over this same ground in the spring. But enough of the flat, former cropland, one or two miles to the north, could be seen from the high vantage point in the church steeple. She could see from a half-mile south of the river all the way north to the far ridgeline that carried Highway 5 around the city.

What she saw, packed onto that two or three miles of open ground, chilled her to the bone. Platoons of ten walkers accompanied by a score of spiders, advancing in serried ranks across the floodplain, marching south. The early morning sun glint off the burnished, alien metal hulls of the mechanical fighting machines, while the hexapod alien spiders jostled for positions around them. The entire thing was a bucking, writhing mass from a demented alien mind, like something from an H.R. Giger painting.

"Oh shit." She dropped the telescope, slithered out of the lookout, and scrambled for the ladder.

Lieutenant Haldane _really_ needed to see this.


	3. Chapter 2: Disinterred

_"Come, all ye mourning pilgrims dear,_  
_Who're bound for Canaan's land,_  
_Take courage and fight valiantly,_  
_Stand fast with sword in hand;_  
_Our Captain's gone before us,_  
_Our Father's only Son,_  
_Then, pilgrims dear, pray, do not fear,_  
_But let us follow on."_  
-Pilgrim, Southern Harmony #150, John A. Granade

* * *

**Somewhere Near Piedmont Avenue**  
**Atlanta, Georgia**  
**10 August, 2011**

The advance patrol, mostly late of the 37th Independent Company and the 9th Regiment's 9th Motorized Squadron, waited in the shadows as aircraft roared over them, off to punish some unlucky pocket of desperate, cut-off holdouts not unlike themselves. They continued to move under cover as much as possible, even as the sound of danger faded.

When the way seemed safe, two of their members ran down the street and scampered up a fresh pile of rubble. Car-sized chunks of stone and concrete had created a giant mound that, with a bit of acrobatics, allowed them to reach the second story of what might have once been an older hotel or apartment. The ruins weren't even remotely stable, but they did offer a nice vantage point.

"You seeing anything up here, bro?" asked Corporal Calvin Payne, scanning the terrain with his rifle scope.

"Not really." Said Private Lucas Isom. "Streets seem a little nicer on this side though. We could squeeze that old Caddy through the back alley over here if it weren't for all the rubble."

"Rubble can be moved." noted Payne.

The private wished his corporal hadn't said that. Yes, it could be done, but it took quite a bit of doing.

* * *

Sweat dripped from Lucas Isom's brow and pooled at his feet as he swung the pickaxe through air humid enough to choke on. Almost an hour had passed and the alley would soon be clear.

It was quiet. The only notable sounds were the drone of alien engines well above the thickening grey clouds, sporadic gunfire in the distance, and the weird mechanical chugging noise of a mech running at full-speed which alerted everyone within a mile and a half of its presence. The things were never known for their stealth, but that was one big disadvantage of their new ability. There was also the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm.

It was going to rain; probably one of those short downpours that typified a Southern summer. Annoying to work in, but it would hopefully help with the sweltering heat of the day. It would also bring desperately needed water to the soldiers working to extract their vehicles from the city, as well as all the wounded whom they were working so desperately to evacuate.

Lucas remembered watching war movies before the falling of the skies, and always wondered if a bunch of bombed-out buildings could really clutter the streets around them that badly. If anything, the moviemakers had probably underestimated the kind of messes made in war. He also remembered going out in the country to do volunteer work with his church in the wake of tornadoes; all those fallen timbers and shattered houses made a hard enough mess for cleanup crews armed with chainsaws, jackhammers, and bulldozers. He could have never imagined the kind of misery that went into purely pre-industrial labour.

But it wasn't all bad. The hotel/apartment must have been the scene of someone's last stand, and they were finding quite a bit of loot as they dug through it.

"Hey, think we could find a place for this on the Sixty Special?" asked one of the soldiers, cradling an M1919A4 machinegun.

"I don't see why not." said Corporal Payne. "These Detroit Dino's are built like aircraft carriers."

There was a sweet Barrett rifle under one of the slabs—barrel bent but still good for parts. A handful of rifle grenades that they handled with the utmost of care; hard to gauge the quality of those homemade deals. A few small arms…

Including an M14 rifle, still looking good, barrel still gripped in the cold dead hands of the previous owner. Looked like one of the 1960's-vintage models that had still been packed with cosmoline when some "anonymous donors" had sent thousands of them to the Georgia Militia.

Private Isom glanced down at his own FN-FAL, which had been faithful to him ever since he first got it and was clearly superior to some old Defense Department's pet project. Well, someone else might want that thing. He grabbed the stock and was surprised to feel the rather small hand holding vice-like to it.

Rigor-mortis? On a two-days dead body? Got to hand it to the hillbillies; even in death they won't give up their guns. He grasped the intransigent limb and was about to start slicing off fingers when he noticed that the Cold Dead Hands were still warm, and moving.

Zombie!? No, wrong genre. For a moment he didn't know how to respond, not remembering what to do when finding a not-dead body in the rubble.

_"M-M-M-MEDIC!"_

* * *

**9th Regimental Aid Station**  
**South of Panthersville, Atlanta, Georgia**  
**10 August, 2011**

The little dirt access road between Flat Shoals Parkway and the South River saw a stream of blood-dripping stretcher teams and vehicles coming from the battlefields. It never seemed to have a start or stop, just a gradual thickening and thinning that was thankfully starting to lean toward the latter.

The 1976 Cadillac Sixty Special rolled through the dusty twilight like a beast from a dying world. It had been one of the biggest non-limo passenger cars ever built, offering plenty of room for a gasifier, pintle mounts, and racks across the hood and trunk upon which upwards to half a dozen stretchers could be placed. Not the first choice for an ambulance but it beat being drug to the aid station in a makeshift travois, as many wounded were.

Major Robert Clifton weaved lazily around wagons and other slower traffic. He wasn't going much faster; charcoal and wood chips didn't provide much in the way of horsepower, and the monster of a car was clearly having trouble living off such a diet.

* * *

Nursing Assistant Denise Clifton watched as the big sedan lumbered into the casualty drop-off area. What had happened to it was a sacrilege; it hadn't been in factory condition when the skies fell and had aged many decades in the past few months. Windows gone, one door missing, bits of siding ripped off, transmission dying, leaking radiator and shot-out headlights haphazardly replaced, though it looked like, in bad visibility, the driver would have to travel more by faith than by sight. This time next year, that elegant piece of Detroit steel would probably be left to rust in a field somewhere, beneath a thick layer of kudzu.

The driver jumped out and began speaking to the officer on duty. He was so covered in dirt and grime—and she so covered in dirt and blood—that husband and wife didn't even recognize each other. Denise began speaking to one of the corporals as stretcher bearers swarmed the car. She moved from patient to patient, removing the cloth or canvas that protected them from the road and preforming a brief examination of each. It was her job to determine what order they saw the doctors, writing heavily abbreviated notes on each one's head with a sharpie marker. It was a good thing they seemed to understand what she was marking, because she very often didn't.

There was a 15-year old girl, terribly mangled from an explosion, and a boy not much older with full-thickness burns over at least a third of his body. Dead already or very soon to be; little need for examination and she wondered why the medics had even bothered to bring them.

Two others were responsive and weakly moaning for help, meaning they probably didn't need it just yet. So long as pulse and respiration were good they could wait until the others were looked at.

There was a man thrown from a horse with severe head and neck trauma, and another with an abdominal gunshot wound and probable intestinal injuries. Those would be the first in the OR; there were two surgeons on duty right now so it didn't really matter what order she marked them. One man with a bullet lodged in his lung, though the field medics seemed to have done an admirable job of stabilizing him before the journey. He would be number three. And the fourth...

"Corporal, there's no triage tag on this one. What happened to her?"

"At least two days underneath a building. Broken bones, severe dehydration, possible internal bleeding…"

She scribbled on the woman's head then turned to summon a litter team.

"Red tag here. Put her fourth in line and set up a new rehydration IV."


	4. Chapter 3: Howling Wilderness

_We have a howling wilderness,_  
_To Canaan's happy shore,_  
_A land of dearth, and pits, and snares,_  
_Where chilling winds do roar._  
_But Jesus will be with us,_  
_And guard us by the way;_  
_Though enemies examine us,_  
_He'll teach us what to say._  
-Pilgrim, Southern Harmony #150, John A. Granade

* * *

**9 August, 2011**  
**Sweetwater Creek State Park**

Captain Hall and his men would spend the night in the woods with fellow militiamen who had made it out of Fulton County. The enemy held the river, and they were steadily making their way up the creeks and tributaries that fed it.

"Last folks to camp out here sure didn't follow the Leave No Trace Policy, did they." asked the Captain, scraping bits of refuse away from where they were going to dig their Dakota fire hole.[1]

"Well, think about it." said Pastor Rodney Byrne, the company chaplain, "Thousands of panicked wretches trying to pack into these few square miles, little to no outdoor experience, of course they'll leave a mess..."

They tried to imagine it. The nearby residents must have seen a waiting refuge on this island of forest in the midst of suburbia. Many had grabbed whatever they could carry and made their way to the park, probably expecting to live off fish, game, nuts, and berries until whatever was happening blew over. They tired and stripped themselves of their (mostly useless) possessions as they travelled. They found that nature wasn't as accommodating as they had expected. The end result for many of them left little to the imagination; the whole park was pockmarked with shallow graves, and they had found quite a few human bones amidst the garbage.

"...pretty ruins, though." he said at last, referencing the huge brick columns along the creek that their campsite overlooked.

"You know the story behind those ruins, don't you?" the captain asked.

"Vaguely." said the native Irishman. "It was a big textile mill, one of the biggest in the state? Burned by Sherman?"

"That's part of it. There was a whole village surrounding the New Manchester Mill, somewhere between two and five hundred people lived here. All the men were at war when Sherman reached the area, and the mill had been making uniforms for the Confederacy, so he charged the remaining women and children here and in Roswell with treason and held them prisoner in Marietta."

"Charged with treason? For making uniforms?"

"Raped, too, some of them. They were eventually deported to the north, where many died of starvation or exposure in the refugee camps. Most of the survivors were never able to return home."[2]

It seemed that the darkened woods had grown very quiet as the old tragedies were recollected, and the men wondered what it might portend for Atlanta. In 150 more years, would nothing but a few tall bits of brick and concrete exist to remind people that it had once been a thriving metropolis? And how many legs would be on the hikers who came to visit?

Forty-nine of C Company's stragglers would return in the night and the following day, bringing the total strength up to 164. About half of those were actually under Captain Hall's command when they had marched into Atlanta. He didn't know where the others were, and hoped that they had found a safe place with other units.

They would be leaving the park tomorrow. The rendezvous point was supposed to be at the Cobb County fairgrounds, but Lithia Springs and Austell were so thick with the enemy that he didn't know how to get there. The plan for now was to veer to the northwest and cross the Tom Murphy Freeway near Fairburn Road before they headed north. If things were better around Powder Springs and Hiram, they might loop back to the fairgrounds. Otherwise they would keep heading north towards the Etowah River; they had heard of plans to dig in on the river and do what they had done on the Chattahoochee. It wasn't much but it was the best idea they could come up with.

* * *

**10 August, 2011**  
Yet another residential area lost to firestorm, with nothing left but burned chimneys standing sentinel over the wastes. The recon team moved cautiously through the ash; the only sound was the thirsty creaking of their bicycles.

"You were invited to the officers' meeting last night, Skitter, why didn't you go?" asked Second Lieutenant Alonzo Ferreira.

"Why would I want to go? The only thing they'll be doing is griping about the last Atlanta Campaign and over-thinking this one. One thing I've learned: If we want to get out of this city alive, we can't rely on the natives."

"I don't understand" said the Brazilian "Aren't you a native?"

"Nope. Massachusetts born and bred. Adopted the accent for, uh, professional reasons."

"I see... I used to meet a lot of men like you when I patrolled the favelas."

He was smiling as he said this, but Ferreira was coming to the conclusion that he did not much like Staff Sergeant John "Skitter" Bishop. He didn't like his long hair, his deliberately-unkempt look, or his rather grotesque habit of making trophies from the body parts of slain enemies. Skitter was a highly competent squad leader when he wanted to be, perhaps the best in the company, but he wanted to act like an eternal malcontent with this cutesy Devil-may-care attitude. It was not helpful, and it was not amusing.

"Alonzo, you saw how thick they are on the highways, and the byways, and the bike paths, and pretty much every path we could possibly take. I know that in the past we launched too many frontal assaults when we shouldn't have, and I know that we're in no condition for a fight now, but we ain't getting out of this without a fight. What we should do is find a few hotheads to hit them as hard as we can. Punch a hole as big as we can and as deep as we can, run through it and don't stop running till we reach a place without charred vinyl."

Ferreira shrugged. I'm sure that Captain Hall will ask for your tactical advice when he wants it.

* * *

**Diary Entry: Morning, Friday, August 12, 2011**

You may be wondering why this entry is not in my handwriting, and why it's being written with a pink colored pencil. Let's just say that, when it's Monday morning and you're laying on the ground, looking up at the building you just fell out of as pieces of it peel off and fall on you, you had better realize that you're going to have a wicked bad week.

I am in a hospital now. Most of my body is bruised like a prune, I have a cracked rib and my right foot is broken in two places. They'll be doing surgery on it tomorrow. I am hurt so bad I can't even get out of bed. I asked one of the kids here if he would write an entry for me, thus the pink.

[He had insisted on pink, because I'm a girl. Little strange but I've heard stranger.]

I'd say more, but I'm very tired and really don't know what else I can say. Maybe tomorrow I'll be in better shape.

* * *

**Diary Entry: Morning, Saturday, August 13, 2011**

Surgery apparently went well. They say I'll be on crutches for four weeks, and I might need a cane for much longer. I asked when I might get in touch with my company, and they have no idea. Pretty much everyone is falling back, and we might not even stay in place here for much longer.

I'm on the south side of the South River, south of Panthersville in South Atlanta. I don't think I could have been taken any further south, and it's the exact opposite from where I needed to go.

My company, if they're still alive, will be heading to the Cobb County fairgrounds I guess. After that they'll probably head even further north, to Kennesaw or more likely to Acworth. I guess I need to report back to them... someday... somehow...

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Small hole in the ground with a fire burning in it and another hole dug diagonally to provide air to the fire. Apart from the obvious stealth benefits, having an in-ground fire means that it'll be hotter and require less fuel, and also produce less smoke (put it under the leaves and branches of a nearby tree if you need to further dissipate smoke). When it's time to move on, the hole can be refilled to easily conceal any evidence of a fire.

Survivaltopics dot com has a very good guide on how to build one.

2\. There's a book that came out recently "The Women Will Howl: the Union Army's Capture of New Roswell and Manchester, Georgia, and the Forced Relocation of Mill Workers" by Mary Deborah Petite. I haven't read it yet, but perhaps it could shed more light on this surprisingly little-known event.

It's still a rather... contentious issue as to how badly Southerers did or didn't suffer during the War Between the States. Certainly we weren't as bad off as the Irish under Cromwell or the Quebecois under Charles Lawrence, but it was still a deeply traumatizing era. Census records are about all we have to go on, and these in the 19th century were notoriously unreliable. 50,000 civilian deaths is a commonly-given number, though that might be an underestimate (first produced by eminent Civil War historian James McPherson, who's 620,000 military death toll has also been questioned in recent years.) My old Middle School Georgia History textbook said that between a fifth and a fourth of the state's population disappeared (presumably dead or displaced) between 1860 and 1870.


	5. Chapter 4: Reprieve

_The pleasant fields of paradise,_  
_So glorious to behold,_  
_The valleys clad in living green,_  
_The mountains paved with gold:_  
_The trees of life with heavenly fruit,_  
_Behold how rich they stand_  
_Blow, gentle gales, and bear my soul_  
_To Canaan's happy land._  
-Pilgrim, Southern Harmony #150, John A. Granade

* * *

******12 August, 2011  
****South of I-20  
******Douglasville, Georgia******  
**  
Lieutenant David Hall pulled his bayonet from the carapace of the dying spider and slung the rifle butt around and into the face of the one that followed. He heard his stock crack from the impact, not that it mattered now.

"Been good to know you people!" he yelled to the other surviving humans in the room.

"Been an honor, son." said his sergeant between coughs, laying on the floor and trying to hold his guts in.

"Yeah! Been real, homes!" yelled one of his privates, fighting off his foe with a kukuri in one hand and folding chair in the other.

The spiders had learned a thing or two about "dynamic entry." While more came down the partially-collapsed basement stairwell, others came from the door to the garage or climbed down the hole they had made in the kitchen. Red and purple blood mixed together on the rough concrete floor; the humans were resisting bravely, but ultimately in vain. They were gradually overwhelmed as the noise of battle faded.

* * *

From another house down the street, Captain Hall listened powerlessly as another chunk of his company was chewed off and digested. It had seemed like a good idea to hide until the spiders passed on or spread out, and he still believed that it would have been even worse to try a banzai charge across Interstate 25 like others had suggested. If anyone had made it across the eight lanes of open ground, they would have never gotten to the equally well-patrolled Veteran's Memorial Highway. They had lasted a lot longer by going to ground in the houses, though it was only "longer" in the sense that strangulation by the hangman's noose took longer than the instant snap of one's neck.

"So, what's the strategy now, Cap?" asked one of the soldiers bitterly.

"Just keep quiet and hope they pass us by. They probably won't search all the buildings."

It was a lie and he knew it. The search and destroy sweep was going to root them all out; he and all his troops were going to die tonight. C Company was finished, and he knew that it was his fault. Waiting for his time to come, his only wish at this point was that he could somehow be forgiven, and that each man, woman and child in his unit would sell their lives dearly.

* * *

**Diary Entry: Morning, Monday, August 15, 2011**

Remember the old Saturday morning cartoons with the dumb Southern bumpkins: whiskey jug in one hand and shotgun in the other? Lazing around in the middle of the day all summer long? If they wore shoes at all, they were so worn out that the front ends were busted and would flop up and down with each step they took?[1] Before I came down here, I almost believed that Georgia outside of Atlanta might really look like that. Truth is, to some extent it probably did:

They drank lots of whiskey because distilling corn is one of the best ways to store and transport it. They carried shotguns everywhere because their region is full of venomous snakes and other dangerous or nuisance animals. They did most of their work in twilight and the cooler seasons because toiling under the Georgia sun in high summer will easily kill you.

Never understood the shoe thing though. I mean, if your footwear is that crappy then why not just go barefoot? I often did when I was growing up, it always seemed more comfortable to do without shoes when it got hot, and probably better on your feet.

You'll get a parasite if you do that in the South. Or at least you would have at one time. The clay and sandy soil here is a fertile breeding ground for hookworm and other very nasty things, and the lack of modern sanitation means that they could come back in a big way. And I notice that a lot of the people in this hospital unit are walking the shoes right off their feet. I wonder if that's something I could help with...

* * *

**Diary Entry: Evening, Monday, August 15, 2011**

There's a weird story going around about the slendermen finding the location of our regimental commanders, making a personal visit by spaceship and asking them to come back to the tower to negotiate. One version has it that a single slenderman, replete with a harnessed teenage girl as its proxy/mouthpiece, personally approached them and convinced at least one to come along by threatening to go after his children if he didn't. Another version has it that they shot the slenderman, tossed a grenade into the open boarding ramp of the ship and rescued the proxy.[2] Knowing what I do of Colonel Berry and his staff, I know what I'm more inclined to believe.

It's been hot here, and it rained today. Not much else has happened lately. I was asked if I was up for going out with the wagons and helping watch the kids as they gathered blackberries. It seemed like a good excuse to move around and maybe get some fresh air, so I agreed. I spent the day sitting on the seat or in the shade with an old 16-gauge double-barreled shotgun, keeping my eyes peeled for Spiders and robots... or more likely, feral dogs and rattlesnakes. During our noon break they all lined up to sign my cast. It was a pretty good day.

Haha! "Pretty good?" More like "Idyllic", watching those kids work and play without a care about what's happening in the world. There's a watering hole nearby and at midday they'll all go fishing or dive in and cool themselves off. I see them chasing each other up and down trees, looking for frogs or squirrels to catch and tame (or eat), doing scavenger hunts in the rubble. It's kind of like watching a scene out of "So Dear to My Heart" or "Song of the South."

Sometimes I can almost forget that, somewhere out there, there's still a war raging.

* * *

**13 August, 2011**

Lieutenant Hall wasn't sure how he had made it out of that basement as he ran and stumbled through the full moonlight across a denuded kudzu field. All thought of resisting to the last or getting his wounds "on his front side" were gone as he tried to flee. The robots were illuminating the whole area with their searchlights, and somewhere in his mind he knew that it would be a matter of time before they sought him out, then they would shoot him and he would die. He'd be better off to stand and fight and his brain tried to tell that to his feet, but they were having none of it.

He heard a human scream somewhere close behind him, followed by the chatter of rapidly-closing skitters. A searchlight washed over him, but then he saw a series of rapid flashes coming from the trees. Out went the searchlight, and a second one shone on the trees to illuminate—he could barely believe his eyes—a cloaked human silhouette holding what looked like a recurve bow!

"LOOSE!"

He dropped to the ground as the arrows filled the sky. The charging spiders screamed as archers rose from cover to fire.

"LOOSE!"

Another volley and a squad of spiders lay dead or dying. Good job, but they still had about 50 more spiders and at least as many 'bots to deal with.

"Riders, forward!"

At the command, about fifty horsemen mounted their steeds and tore into the cul-de-sac. Some of them fired suppressed pistols and submachineguns as they charged, others used swords, spears, and hammers, while a few seemed to carry still more bows. They gradually switched to shotguns and rifles as the element of surprise wore off, and a few heavy machineguns and anti-tank rifles opened up on the robots. That actually relieved him a bit; for a moment, he thought he was being rescued by the Raiders of Thulsa Doom.

* * *

The two men walked together across the battlefield in the pre-dawn twilght, one wearing charcoal-grey robes and leading his big grey horse alongside him. C company, though still somewhat shell-shocked, was gathering itself together and would be moving again before daybreak.

"You keep bumping into the same people in this war, don't you." said Captain Hall, consciously avoiding any mention of the change in clothes. "What happened to Major Langdon?"

"Dead." said Captain Sonny Stack. "You would have been too if we had found you a few hours later."

"You took an awful risk for us, just a couple hundred of you attacking those things with bows and arrows. Maybe that's the kind of crazy that'll get us out of this mess."

The young cowboy shrugged and grinned. "Hey, I always heard that if the world ever goes completely medieval, bet on whichever tribe shows up with horse archers. We still have a fair number of explosives, but not enough ammunition. And we wanted to take out the first wave of crabs and walkers somewhat quietly."

"We have the opposite problem, explosives wise... hey, how did you do that anyway, finding a quiet way to kill bots? The only ways I know of are pit traps and suppressed heavy sniper rifles, and those never seem to work."

Stack's grin grew in intensity and he pointed at one of the slain machines. "Go take a look for yourself and tell me what it looks like."

Captain Hall carefully examined the damage, and presently returned with a heavy piece of Terran metal that he had yanked from one of limbs. An increasing look of perplexion was showing on his face as he considered some of the odd-looking wooden frames he had seen being hauled around by members of the column.

"Is this a... ballista bolt?"

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. I actually have a pair of otherwise-decent workboots that really do that. Good ventilation.

2\. Annnd... good bye Worst Parts of Seasons 2 and 3.

I'm joking. I have been thinking about it though, and, even though it showed a remarkable level of egalitarianism in their culture, I've decided that I probably won't have any human teenagers ascend to the position of regional overlord. Not in the first few years at least. Some form of integration may eventually happen, but I'm thinking that, if anything, the thing with Karen is going to be more akin to the Espheni's idea of a joke.

* * *

Part of this chapter (horse archers!) is an homage to the very well-done and entertaining fanfic by GuardofLiberty: Rekindling the Flame.


	6. Chapter 5: The Cobbler's Children

_"Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world."_  
-Marilyn Monroe

* * *

**13 August, 2011**  
**Lithia Springs, GA**

Captain Hall watched in the first light of day as the last of his command sprinted across Veterans Memorial Parkway and the Norfolk Southern railroad. Two lines paralleled each other here, and two trains had been passing each other when a kinetic strike cratered both of them. One had carried food while other had been packed with shoes and uniforms for the National Guard. Both had long ago been thoroughly looted.

His company, plus the Atmarga Column, plus scattered elements of the 4th Alabama, numbered some 360 soldiers. It had been a series of running gun-battles since Douglasville, and he was amazed that they had made it so far without being nuked and with surprisingly little harassment at all from the air.

The humans were careful to determine where and in what manner they gave ground, and stood ready to launch a quick counterattack when it looked like the aliens were enveloping them or marshalling their forces for an all-out assault. Somehow, most had escaped the endless strip malls and parking lots and subdivisions, and would soon break into the relatively less-developed portions of north Douglas and south Paulding County.

Although it almost seemed pointless now, he still wanted to see if anyone had made it back to their intended rallying point in Cobb County. The Atmarga Column was going west to Paulding and that, he had to admit, made more sense. He would go with them as far as South Paulding High School, a small detachment would go into Cobb to look for stragglers or any signs of where they had gone. They expected it to take about nine days to get there, and they would wait no more than five days for the search party to return. The cavalry would be heading for Euharlee while Hall's people still planned to go to Acworth.

* * *

**Diary Entry: Evening, Tuesday, August 16, 2011.**

Slept in. Didn't feel very good today, think my old giardia problems are coming back.

You keep bumping into the same people in this war. If it was fiction I'm sure the writer would be accused of being terribly uncreative. One of the nurses here is the same one who tended to me when I first got sick in April. Her husband, Robert Clifton, is the same one who's 37th Independent Assault Company went across the Chattahoochee with us in May. His unit is assigned to defend the hospital and work as a screening force for his regiment in Covington.

"No assaulting for us any more" he says, "not any time soon, at least."

So there's about four-hundred people here, between the soldiers, doctors and patients. Pretty big crowd. We've had overflights by enemy bombers, and there's been a few scattered enemy patrols along the South River, but so far we haven't had any serious risk of detection.

I've had a chance to work around some of the other, more seriously wounded patients. It hasn't been nearly as bad as I thought it would be, I don't know what I was expecting though. The hospital doesn't get new cases very often these days, so maybe the worst of them have already had time to die, or maybe their surgeons (like ours) got a lot better over the course of the summer, or maybe I'm just so much more used to blood and guts than I used to be.

* * *

**Diary Entry: Afternoon, Wednesday, August 17, 2011**

Doing a little better today, and I've been working inventory with some of the older folks here. Gave me a chance to see what we have in terms of needles, thread, leather, rawhide and rubber. I'm going to poach a few kids from the blackberry-gatherers tomorrow and see if John Toland taught me enough about cobbling to save this unit from the specter of shoelessness.

I'd say that about a third of us are walking around with sub-par footwear, and about a two-thirds of those can be mended. So take five or more kids and adults with half an idea of how to sew, put them on four-hour shifts in the hottest part of the day, give them two-hundred-odd shoes and it should take them, oh, a week and a half to fix them all.

Some people need new shoes entirely, and I'd also like to make some sandals/water shoes for people who might already have good footwear, so that the footwear stays good. This seems to be a big problem for us, we could have a truckload of hiking boots fall from the heavens tomorrow and they might be worn out by the end of winter simply because of how quickly this hot and humid climate kills leather. In C Coy, Toland made sandals and moccasins with the soles taken from ruined truck tires, and we wore those whenever our regular boots were wet or we were expected to march through water. He got the idea from a pair that his brother had brought home from Vietnam. Simple but effective, and making about a hundred of them shouldn't take more than a week.[1]

* * *

**Diary Entry: 7:40 PM, Sunday, August 21, 2011**

Toland made this look so easy!

The problem with mass-produced shoes and boots is that they were never made with repair in mind. Fixing holes and burst seams is often very difficult without completely disassembling the shoe, and sometimes I wonder if a few of our fixes have done more harm than good.

We do have one thing that helps a lot: an old foot-powered leather sewing machine like what I used to see the Amish use to repair their horse tack. Obviously I can't use it, but one of the guys (yes, guys) grew up using one like it and we may be able to get another one operable soon.

Something we've done with a lot of our completely ruined old shoes is sort them by type and size and cannibalized them to make completely new ones. Weirdest looking things you ever saw but they work for now.

As for the sandals? The part I thought would be simple? Well…

The problem with the bits of truck tread that we gathered from the highways to use as sandals is the steel belted radials that are embedded in most of them. They're a pain to try cutting through, (literally, I have the scars to prove it) they're heavy, and they generally won't bend to fit the contours of one's feet. Finding a tire that doesn't have them is ideal, cutting the sole for one's shoe from the sidewall works too. Takes a long time either way, so I asked to draft more child-workers for my cobbler crew and keep them working longer. The easy foraging in our area is about tapped out now, so Captain Madea Simmons agreed to both.

[As an aside, I can't help but shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally WRONG about that woman. I don't mean in terms of attitude or competence or even sanity, though she most certainly is crazy and apparently she was crazy even before the war. But there's something uncanny about her, I can't even begin to guess what it might be.]  
Got a new watch! They said that I could probably use it now that I have my own little command again, even though I'm essentially in command of a sweatshop. The 37th Company/9th Regimental Aid Station, like C Company, no longer observes Daylight Savings Time.

Maybe we'll have things in a better condition by the time my cast comes off, after which I really want to make the journey back to find my regiment. We've received word that the 12th Regiment is still operational and heading north to Acworth, but no word on the state of individual companies.

Went to the Sunday morning service today. It was a Baptist service, a little more energetic than most of the ones I went to in North Atlanta, but similar in most important ways. There's a thunderstorm raging outside right now. That's annoying, especially the sound of the wind rapping against my tent, but I think it should blow over in another hour or so.

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Dép lốp aka Ho Chi Minh sandals, one of the iconic features of the Viet Cong attire and also quite common in post-war Europe, or really anywhere where people are suffering long-term commercial disruptions.


	7. Chapter 6: Of Bicycles and Burros

_"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."_  
-H. G. Wells

* * *

**Powder Springs, Georgia**  
**27 August, 2011**

The detachment from C Company stopped to rest and repair in a wooded area off of Brownsville Road, which would take them most of the way back to their unit. Kelly Bond stood watch with the others as her brother put the wheel back on his bicycle.

"I can't believe that tourniquet trick really worked." she said.

"Yeah. Got an unpatchable tube? Just tie off the busted end, pack the dead space with leaves and reinflate it. Ain't a good idea to ride like that long-term, but it should get you back to where you can find another one."

Simone took the old tube and handed it to Private Justin "Seven Fingers" Hallock, who packed it into his saddlebag where the good one had been. Maybe someone back at camp could fix it, or find another use for it.

They had decided to split the eleven-man squad in two for most of the return trip, due to the unexpectedly large number of people coming back. What many of the scouts had decried as a fool's errand had ultimately picked up eight of the company's wayward souls, and one of its pack animals. They had only brought two spare folding bikes, so six of the prodigal sons were forced to go on foot or ride pillion on luggage racks, handlebars, wheel pegs, or in trailers. There was no dignified—or safe—way to do this, and Simone hoped they could make it the rest of the way to their new home without an ambush.

His mountain bike had been a high-quality model when it came out thirty years ago. The chain and seat stays had been badly warped when he found it, and the rear wheel was starting to wobble again. The rear brakes had been replaced with some that he'd found off a wrecked cheapie Wal-Mart bike, the handlebars of which were now affixed to Kelly's. Atlanta hadn't been known for its cycle culture before the war, but there were enough of them hanging in garages and basements that pretty much every survivor in the city had access to a bicycle. Spare parts for all these velocipedes were starting to get rare, and this was some cause for concern.[1]

"So what are we going to do when the last tire hits a nail and we've used the last patch kit?" asked Kelly.

"Ride horses, like the Atmargas." said Simone.

"Horses for all of us? And we'll feed them… how?" Kelly didn't bother to point out that a good portion of the Atmarga Column now peddled into battle.

"C'mon, I'm serious." she continued. "We could ride on the rims for a while, but that would ruin the wheels eventually. Could we use wooden wheels, maybe? I think the earliest bicycles used light carriage wheels."

Justin Hallock was directly behind the siblings, the burro's leadline tied around his handlebar. Their little old jack donkey had been blinded during his previous service with the militia, but he had learned to trot along to the clicking of bicycle wheels and made a very useful companion whenever they brought things that wouldn't fit into their panniers.

"Eeyore here is wearing shoes made from the sidewalls of a car tire. " said Justin, "We could do the same for bicycles, take strips of rubber and pack the rims with them, or maybe we could use old shoe soles."

"What about leather? Or corn-silk?" asked one of the others. "Maybe we could…"

Justin's burro dug his feet into the pavement and stopped so suddenly that he almost pulled the cyclist to the ground. He refused to move another inch and began to give out a muted, raspy whine, the best he could do since his vocal cords were gone.[2] Some of the other scouts looked on in confusion or annoyance. Simone jumped from his bike, unshouldered his SKS carbine and started scanning the nearby treeline.

The first robot rose up from behind a stand of bushes and was promptly brought down by a couple of rifle-grenades. More appeared, accompanied by charging teams of spiders. The scouts fell back to cover, forced to leave their uncooperative donkey in the crossfire.

The blind donkey stood impassively. He could tell that the humans were leaving, but didn't feel the need to follow them just yet. He also knew that the strange things that had become such a problem lately were fast approaching, but it didn't seem like they were noticing him. There was grass nearby, and he wondered if anyone would hold it against him if he had a little meal.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 3:30 PM, Wednesday, August 24, 2011***

Went to a funeral on Monday, a guy that I had come to know pretty well finally succumbed to his infections. Almost felt weird being able to grieve normally again, instead of just feeling relieved that it wasn't me.

We've been working hard and we're actually doing pretty good on the shoe front. My workers are becoming reasonably skilled, and they should have a handle on things once I'm gone.

I'm getting better as a crutch walker, and I've been asked if I'd like to go on another foraging run again. I said that I would, since I do need to get away from the shoes for awhile. I like my new cobbling job but I don't want to get burned out on it. We'll go tomorrow if it doesn't rain, and I don't think it will.

It's in the 90's right now. At least there's a decent cloud cover at the moment, and it dropped into the 60's last night, same as it did on several nights last week. Maybe we're starting to see an end to this boiling hot summer.

I'm going to miss it when it's pitch black, 25 Degrees out and I'm trudging through the mud on a miserable January morning, aren't I?

* * *

***Diary Entry: 9:00 PM, Thursday, August 25, 2011***

Foraged ourselves a steer!

I'm not joking. While we were out, someone noticed a big Brahmin grazing in the shade, and we managed to bring him back with us. He seemed friendly enough, so friendly that I think he might be a trained draft ox. No idea where he came from.

We're still debating whether or not to turn him into steak, and I say that we never know when we could use an ox. Our food situation is still pretty good. We had hominy grits and sorgum cakes for breakfast, turtle and I think armadillo for supper, and we're having meat-and-veggie stew for dinner. The meat will probably be rat and maybe snake if we're lucky. The veggies were supplied from the gardens of, if you can believe this, an honest-to-God Trappist Monastery in Conyers that has several members working with our aid station and the 37th Independent Company.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 11:30 AM, Saturday, August 27, 2011***

Rained yesterday.

Radios are working a lot better now. I almost wish they weren't, because the news is never good. A lot of smaller cities in Georgia are seeing major signs of occupation and possibly even colonization. Spiders are either building their own structures or rebuilding ours to fit their purposes, and we have no idea what those purposes might be. From what we've gathered, they've set up branch offices in Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Athens, maybe Rome...

We received an emissary last night from a company that's been shadowing a big spider force moving north on the Yellow River towards Covington. I got to meet one of them, and jokingly asked if they had lost any cattle lately. As a matter of fact, a supply train from their regiment got lost in our area a few days ago, and one of their oxen was driven away during a Spider ambush. Brahmin, slow but strong, and one of the gentlist creatures you'll ever meet. If he hasn't been eaten yet, they sure would like to have him back.

Me and my big, fat mouth.

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Bicycles in our culture tend to be associated with children, yuppies and vagrants, and that is unfortunate. If you don't have a room and feed for a horse, they're just about the best choice for transportation in an oil-starved environment. A bicycle that spent its life in storage will also be more easily put to practical use than a horse that spent its life as an expensive form of weed control.

2\. HEE-HAW! HAW-HEE-HAW-HEE-HEE! HEE-HAAWW!

Donkeys and mules like to bray about as much as roosters like to crow. All the time, and for almost any reason, and any other jack who hears the braying will pick up on it so that you'll soon have a chorus of them resounding all across the land. Music to my ears, but I can see how it might annoy some people.

If Espheni forces have come to associate equids with humans, surgical removal of the larynx would probably become common for frontline units, as it was for pack animals in many previous wars. Debarking might become equally common for dogs.

Some ethical concerns might be raised about the cutting of vocal cords (it is actually illegal in some states) but, well, think about it. Domestic animals are routinely GELDED, and I for one know which one I'd rather lose.

On the other hand, civilians and rear-area units would most certainly want the animals to keep their voices, since they would serve a useful purpose as guards.


	8. Chapter 7: Between Two Fronts

**28 August, 2011**  
**Near South Paulding High School**  
**3.6 miles northwest of Douglasville, Georgia**

The school itself was crawling with spiders, so C Company had decided to temporarily camp out in the woods to the east, once again on the banks of Sweetwater creek.

"It's pretty nice here." said Jack Landor, one of the company's newest recruits. "Maybe my group would still be alive if we had headed for the woods instead of sticking out in that subdivision."

"I'm honestly amazed you lasted for so long" said Captain Hall. "But I don't know if you would have done better in these woods."

He poked a small hole into the soft ground with his walking stick, which quickly started filling with water.

"See how swampy it is? If the snakes didn't get you, the mosquitoes and the other nasties in the water would."

"Snakes?" asked Landor, blanching. "And nasties in the water? You don't mean alligators, do you?"[1]

Hall stifled a chuckle. Jack Landor had been an engineering student at Georgia Tech with dreams of being a bridge builder (that could come in handy later); he was quite brilliant, but he was definitely going to need some work on his woodsmanship skills.

"Not alligators, not this far north. Try amebas, cryptosporidium, or giardia. We had one soldier come down with giardia and it almost killed her. Had crippling intestinal problems for the rest of her life."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Dr. Everett should have time to talk to you about our sanitation practices tomorrow. Until then… well… don't drink or eat anything outside camp unless we tell you it's safe."

* * *

***Diary Entry: 9:10 PM, Saturday, August 27, 2011***

Returning the ox to its rightful owners (E Company, 9th Regiment) was the right thing to do I guess, and on the way out they actually offered a pretty good reward: bags of Vidalia onions!

Apart from being a pleasing addition to our palates, onions are a natural antibiotic. They were called "Russian penicillin" during World War II because they were used as such when the Russians ran out of modern medicine. Apart from that, onions taste good.

More weird stories going around about people getting kidnapped by the aliens and asked to lead the rest of their groups into "neutral zones" where they'll be left in peace. Those who refuse (and apparently, almost everyone does) gets sent to an empty field and all but one gets shot by robots.

I don't know if any of that's true, and I definitely don't buy the "neutral zone" part. "Death camps" maybe, but this has been a war of extermination since the start and I don't think that'll change, any more than I think the collaborators we keep hearing about are doing anything but digging their own graves.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 1:30 PM, Monday, August 29, 2011***

There'd been sporadic fighting in Conyers as the Spider force continues advancing along the Yellow River. Pretty tentative for both sides so far, and we've been taking care of most of their wounded.

Went on another berry run this morning. We spooked a fairly large group of starlings. Blasted away at them with our shotguns and brought several home. Someone said that we should start seeing geese again sometime next month. That would be nice, because they are very big and very good, but I have to wonder how far south they'll be able to make it before someone else gets a chance to shoot them down.

We sent a group of people fishing today, but they didn't come back with much. Local food supply is getting pretty exhausted around here, and we have to send foragers further and further out if we want them to have any chance of finding something. We've still got a couple months worth of food, and we could always go "lobster" hunting if we weren't afraid of antagonizing them too much,[2] but it's going to be a problem for us if we don't work on more reliable food sources ASAP.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 9:30 PM, Wednesday, August 31, 2011***

It was "only" 90 degrees today, much cooler than it has been these last few days.

My cast comes off sometime next month. That makes me incredibly happy and I honestly think I could do without it even now. Still need my cane though, and I don't know when that'll change.

Our cobbling tasks are just about finished and I'm proud to say that any one of my workers could give Jack Toland a run for his money.

I asked Major Clifton if I could leave in search of my company soon. He said he hates to lose me, and he was worried about my ability to travel even without the cast, but he wouldn't stop me from going. Said I could have a bicycle if I wanted, and they would try to find a safe route for me to travel.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 4:30 AM, Thursday, September 1, 2011***

The Spiders in Conyers just upped the ante on us. They've launched a major assault with heavy air support against defending militia, and the 37th Company has asked for volunteers to go on a relief mission. I was one of them, I told them to just stick me in the back of a gun truck, let me do my shooting sitting down and I should be fine.

Our convoy is heading to the scene of heavy fighting near Heritage High School. Should be in position for the counterattack by dawn.

* * *

**2 September, 2011**  
**Monastery of the Holy Spirit**  
**Conyers, Georgia**

"You've looted the sacramental wine, Madea? Really?"

"Just doing what you say, Major. Securing anything we could use!"

Major Robert Williams Clifton left his XO to continue loading the trucks—at least it would keep her out of his hair— and silently asked the pardon of whoever may or may not be listening as his troops prepared the holy ground for battle. The head abbot stood nearby, a 30-30 in his hands.

"I wish I could convince you to evacuate with the others. A lot of us are going to die here."

"I'm not afraid to die." said the old man. "And besides, we already evacuated anyone who might be more useful elsewhere. I and the remaining brothers are too old to be of use to anyone else. This is our home and we'll help you fight for it."

"Alright, but if you're going to fight under my command, you will obey my orders. If I order a retreat and you refuse to obey, I'm going to shoot you myself. No last stands, Father, not yet at least."

The abbot nodded knowingly. Perhaps he had heard similar commands as a young man at the Battle of the Bulge.

Quite a few of the monks had heard shots fired in anger before, or had otherwise been through the kind of harrowing experiences that causes men to dedicate their lives to the priesthood. It wasn't the "Team Conyers" that some of his troops had been desperately hoping really existed (Robert had no idea what all that was all about),[3] but it was something, and he hoped that most of them would survive the coming battle.

The 37th Company would set up a series of ambushes and holding actions all along Scott highway, hopefully slowing the enemy's march. He knew that they couldn't hold for long, and would probably be unable to keep the city from falling, but perhaps the enemy would be so depleted that they'd be vulnerable to counterattacks by the 9th Regiment's reserves, or at least unable to further threaten Lithonia and the Regimental Aid Station. The sound of fighting could already be heard on both of his flanks, and he could also hear the chugging of an approaching "fast drone" that seemed to be just around the bend in the road. He calmly loaded a magazine into his Browning Automatic Rifle.

"Major, major! We've got bad news!" yelled one of their couriers as he jumped from his motorbike and ran to the barricade. Clifton's scowl deepened at the new arrival.

"Let me guess, private: the enemy is about to attack?" he said, glancing back at the cacophony to the east.

"Worse, much worse! Big Warrior force from Atlanta making a bee-line for the hospital, and there's not a thing out there to stop them!" 

* * *

*Diary Entry: 6:00 AM, Friday, September 2, 2011*

Never made it to Conyers. In fact I'm lucky to be alive at all. Least of our problems now.

Not much time to write. There is a HUGE new enemy force moving along the South River and Highway 155. Looks like a standard search-and-destroy sweep, easily the biggest we've seen since we hit the towers. If they and the ones in Conyers are working together, it means we're going to be hemmed in!

We have to evacuate, but I don't know where to. No idea of when I can write again.

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. I have actually had urbanites ask me if we have alligators in North Georgia. We do not, as far as I know, though they do make it as far north as Memphis so I can't say it's impossible. Alligators are occasionally spotted on Lake Lanier, probably placed there by humans.

2\. I'm going to be ignoring the throat-melting scene from Season 5 for the moment, though I could see the Espheni eventually engineering the flesh of their slaves to be toxic to humans. I don't think they would have done it from the start because I don't think they would have expected to face, let alone be eaten by, significant human resistance.

3\. From the John Ringo's Posleen War series, wherein the Jesuits and other elements of the Catholic Church knew about and have spent centuries preparing for the (re)arrival of the Posleen and Darhel. An unnamed monastery in Conyers, Georgia is home to an elite special operations team; to put it simply: "Shao-Lin did not own the monopoly they thought."


	9. Chapter 8: Desperate Ground

**3 September, 2011**  
**9th Regimental Aid Station**

"So, what's Arabia Mountain like anyway" Sarah Tragliabue asked.

"It's a big granite bluff surrounded by old quarries and lots of thick forests." said Charlene Matlock. "About like Panola or Stone Mountain, not as big as Stone Mountain though."

Oh, so it's another monandock?

"Um, I guess."

Sarah tossed her cane into the wagon and then carefully climbed into the driver's seat. Charlene helped her get over the side, then handed up the M14 as well as her own Kel-Tec SU16. Several passengers were also climbing into the back on top of the loaded cargo—consisting mostly of canvas and other tent parts.

"Hey Sarah, my mom is still mad at you for making her cut that cast off." said Rachel from the back, assigned to watch the adults while Denise helped run the med busses.

"Aw, don't worry. It could have come off a week ago."

"It should have stayed on a week longer." said Charlene. "I just hope you remember not to put any serious stress on it."

"Spend the next few days doing nothing but sitting on my butt? Won't have to ask me twice." lied Sarah. "I just didn't want that thing getting in my way if I did have to do any hunting once we reach the big rock." She patted the M14 that now set in easy reach on the gun rack.

"Just remember what my daddy said:" warned Rachel, "walk, think, and BREATH quietly. You're in enemy territory now."

"Noted, sir." she said to the officious 7-year-old.

She now focused her attention on her two horses; fairly high-strung young animals that would probably try racing the other wagons for most of the trip. Keeping them under control would be a challenge, especially since she'd only have one good foot to manipulate the old scrub brakes.

"Giddup!"

* * *

**3 September 2011**  
**Conyers, Georgia**

Robert Williams Clifton and the others ran across the open back yard, jumped the patio wall and dove through the open kitchen door as the patrolling drones opened fire. He heard several of those behind him scream and fall, and scrambled deeper into the building as the room burst into flames from multiple drone rockets. The weakened back part of the big house sheared off and fell in on itself.

He found one of his sergeants and a squad of troops hunkered down in the bathroom and the door to what must have been the garage. The house was still groaning and warning of imminent collapse, and it was starting to fill with smoke.

"Alright soldiers, y'all know those drones have us in a bad place, so…"

These soldiers were own the verge of cracking. He knew that whatever he said next, it had better be good.

"…are all of y'all absolutely sure that you don't have any explosives left? Did you check all of your pockets?"

Even mix of grim chuckles and exasperated groans. He could have done worse.

"No good, sir. They've pulled back the warriors and their using the heavy artillery to root us out house by house. They either burn us out or collapse them in on us."

"Any ideas for getting out of this, sir?" asked one of the soldiers, with not a little acid in his voice. Clifton shook his head.

"Captain Simmons is supposed to be leading a counterattack to take the heat off us. Don't worry, it ain't over till the crazy lady sings."

* * *

Madea ran around the corner with half a dozen drones and almost as many warriors in pursuit, still very mad at her after an incident involving an engine block and gravity. The path was bounded by the house on one side and thick woods on the other, but they didn't seem to notice.

"Yeah that's right," she yelled "bring *all* your friends!"

She scooped up a wine bottle—courtesy of Team Conyers— and touched the cloth-covered neck to an open flame.

"'Cause we having us the Mother of all Crawfish Fries!"

She gave the Molotov cocktail a throw. It shattered against the face of the oncoming warrior and covered it with a burning mix of methanol, motor oil and powdered styrofoam. Black smoke rose from nearly-invisible flames as the stricken creature writhed in a manic blur.

"Salud, baby!"

The second one broke against a drone without igniting, the third made a fireball as it hit, causing the machine to blindly crunch itself against a tree. She tossed a fourth and a fifth and a sixth bottle in quick succession.

The exoskeletal warriors and mechanical drones were not overly vulnerable to flames, but no creature enjoyed being set on fire. The firebombing had completely paralyzed the entire squad, and now it was time for Phase Two.

Six motorcycles raced forward with the riders firing on the warriors while six nomex-clad passengers advanced on the drones with sledgehammers. They quickly dispatched four of them, but the last recovered in time to cut down four humans.

"Everyone fall back! We got Clifton his breathing room, let's get out of here!"

* * *

**4 September**  
**Arabia Mountain**  
**Three miles south of Lithonia, Georgia**

It was around midnight and the enemy had pressed to within two miles on either side of Arabia Mountain. They had been slowed significantly by the surrounding woods and rolling hills, but they were expected to take more ground before the sun came up.

Sarah had been assigned communications duty on top of the mountain. The view was good from here; when the sun came up, they would probably be able to see well into Rockdale and Henry County and perhaps Clayton County. Stone Mountain and Panola Mountain were in line-of-sight. Good if they had to break out the heliographs, but right now they were more interested in the radio reception than the view.

"That'll do, Josh" said Brother Gabe to the deharnessed teen who had helped bring up the BC-654 radio, its antenna and its other parts. "Go get something to eat, you'll take the next shift."

"I can't believe this old thing can pick up transmissions in Tennessee." said Sarah.

"It could probably reach Kentucky if the conditions were right."

He took the canteen and poured two cups of wine—courtesy of Captain Simmons— serving one to Sarah. She looked at the red liquid askance.

"This isn't some kind of sacrilege, is it?"

"Well, the Baptists think so," said the trappist-monk-turned-comms-officer, "but this wine hasn't been blessed yet, so it's perfectly acceptable for us to drink it."

And of course they wouldn't have passed it up even if it was, any more than David and his men would have passed up the tabernacle's showbread.

"Ok, good... cause what we've found deserves a toast!"

* * *

***Diary Entry: 12:30 AM, Sunday, September 4, 2011***

We've retreated to the wooded area around the Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve, the highlight of which is a giant, barren rock with lots of little plaques about all the unique lichens and other local flora that I can't eat and couldn't care less about. Kind of like Stone Mountain without the engravings.

Of course they sent me to the very top of the barren, highly-exposed mountain to put up a radio tent and scream for help from anyone within the sound of my voice. And surprisingly enough, well…

The 37th is completely out of explosives and armor-piercing bullets, I think even the shotgun slugs are gone. The enemy knows this, they've sent in mostly robots to deal with us and we're just about down to kicking them in the shins.

They're pressing in from Salem and Rock Springs Road in the east and Klondike and Flat Shoals road in the west. They've set up a thick perimeter along I-20 and the South River, though they're holding steady on these fronts. That gives us a pocket of about five square miles. They're taking their time with us, but we suspect to all be dead by tomorrow evening.

…there is one glimmer of hope for us. We got a transmission from a unit to the north that wants to help and has enough heavy weapons to blast us out of this mess. If we can get a team north of I-20 to meet up with them, we just might…

_"Hey, do y'all hear that? Motorcycles coming!"_

* * *

Josh stuck his head in and grabbed a rifle with a night-vision scope.

"I'll check it." said Sarah. She didn't hear a thing except the buzz of the radio. She lifted herself from the cot anyway, grabbed another scoped rifle, and hobbled out and down to the edge of the granite cliff.

"Down there, about 800 yards out. Something's following them!"

"Where are you seeing this?"

She tried to scan the rocks and trees with the Ruger M-77. It was mounted with a homemade scope of roughly 1960's-level sophistication; it required star and moonlight to work effectively and they didn't have a lot of that on this partly-cloudy night. But sure enough, two motorcycles were making their climb up the narrow mountain trail, pursued by at least two spiders.

"They won't make it!"

"Open fire, Josh!"

Sarah fired repeatedly at the oncoming hostiles. Hitting a moving target at long range, in the dark, with an unfamiliar weapon was not an easy task; it was a miracle that she didn't hit any humans, and only one of the Spiders had been wounded by the time she ran empty.

"Josh, take down the other one!"

She looked over at Josh, and could tell that he was frozen. No time to get more ammo, she snatched the Remington 770 from his hands and continued shooting with it. The last spider screeched in pain, and if any more were following they decided the bikers weren't worth it.

* * *

"We'll need to send a squad to make sure there's no more infiltrators around this mountain." said Major Clifton. "Now what is it that was so important for us to come and hear?"

"We got in touch with a company from 11th Regiment." said Sarah. "They're going to leave a truckload of heavy weapons in the quarry north of Lithonia if we can get someone up there to take it."

"We'll have to punch through some heavy resistance to do that." said Captain Simmons. "What kind of weapons?"

"Old M72 LAWs, landmines, grenades, and a quadruple-mounted set of .50 caliber machineguns, some kind of anti-aircraft system."

"Sweet Christmas!" exclaimed Clifton.

"Groovy, when can we go get it?" asked Madea.


	10. Chapter 9: Lifting the Siege

"Put the army in the face of death where there is no escape and they will not flee or be afraid - there is nothing they cannot achieve."  
-Sun Tzu

* * *

***Diary Entry: 5:50 AM, Sunday, September 4, 2011***

Haven't been getting enough sleep, one of the nurses gave me a nicotine patch and some coca leaves to get me through this mission. Better and worse than meth, I guess.

My foot tells me that it's going to start raining today. Never imagined that my bones would be predicting the weather at the age of 20.

We had an incident last night when our commanders came riding up the hill with a couple of Spiders hot on their tail. I and another radio assistant, Josh, a 14-year-old deharnessed boy, had to cover them with our rifles and… there's no easy way to say this… he choked. Major Clifton and Captain Simmons nearly died because of it.

Now, this happens to a lot of people in situations like that, but I keep hearing that it's a big problem with deharnessed kids. And we know that some of them have the whole Stockholm thing going on. Could it be that they still have a connection, willful or otherwise, with their former masters? I don't want to feel suspicious towards the hundreds of liberated teens who have proven themselves to be courageous fighters, but as an NCO I'll have to balance the combat potential of an individual against the risks he may pose to the rest of the unit…

Oh yes, Sergeant Tagliabue is back. They're sending some scouts to go get those guns and I volunteered. We think the Stonecrest Mall represents a weak point in their perimeter, a "Special Detachment" from the 11th is going to try and infiltrate the building while we attack from the outside, we'll run north as fast as we can to link up with the unit holding our cache, and then we'll blast our way back to Arabia Mountain. Timing will be everything and we'll rely on the capability of two groups of people we've never met before… what could go wrong?

As for Josh, he deserves and will receive credit for spotting the spiders in the first place. I think he's just (understandably) scared. If so, I'm going to have to make him more scared of me than he is of them… it's one part of being a sergeant that I really hate.

* * *

**4 September**  
** Arabia Mountain**  
** Three miles south of Lithonia, Georgia**

Sarah wouldn't have been able to safely operate a motorcycle, but a four-wheeler wouldn't be too much of a problem; ideally, she'd spend most of the mission riding on back.

Josh drove them both from the radio tent to the staging area.

"Stay here," he said "I'll get some more food and ammo."

It was the first thing he had said to her since the shooting.

"Hey Josh, this is going to be your first combat mission, isn't it?"

"Um, I've been in battle before."

"That ain't what I asked, Private!"

Even to Sarah, it sounded like someone else was talking.

"Look, last night was a close call. If you let it happen again and we fail to get those guns then this whole company is screwed, and so help me I'll make sure you suffer for it!"

Josh was almost trembling at this point, but his look of shock slowly turned into one of grim determination.

"I won't let it happen again!"

Sarah grinned.

"I know you won't. That's why I asked Captain Simmons to put you in this squad. I told her and the Major that it was you who raised the alarm last night; they owe you their lives…"

Now it was Josh's turn to grin.

"Now go get me some breakfast, I'm starving."

* * *

**The Mall at Stonecrest  
Lithonia, Georgia**

Something about these temples to mass consumerism seemed to draw people to die in them.

Sergeant First Class David Mueller examined a shell casing he had picked up off the dust-covered floor. He had seen enough last stands to get pretty good at autopsying them. At least two had been fought here before, one when the war started last winter and another no more than a couple of months ago. The latter had been the most substantial; they had done a good job of sealing the entrances and had brought plenty of firepower in with them, but it hadn't been enough. In particular, they hadn't counted on Skitters coming through the roof, just as the Skitters in their hubris hadn't counted on the SF team doing likewise.

"Mall's secure, Sergeant. I've sent snipers on the roof to watch for…"

Gunfire to the south. That would be the beleaguered elements of the 37th Company.

"Thank you, Private. Let's get ready to greet our new friends."

* * *

"You got here early." said Sarah to the Green Berets who greeted her at the main entrance.

"We're still on daylight savings time." said Mueller. "Did you have any trouble?"

"Our lieutenant's wounded, not seriously. We should be ready to go in a few minutes."

Sarah was thankful for her non-leaky boots right now, because the corridor was soaked in purple blood. The spiders had died unawares, throats cut open and heads destroyed by suppressed weapons. She and a few others examined one of the robots that had crashed through one of the display windows: giant hole in the vitals, no exit wounds. She wondered what could have done that with little more than a whisper…

"30 millimeter shell…" said Mueller in anticipation of their questions. "Not too different from what was used on the GAU-8 Gatling Gun. It's a huge bullet and a heavy gun, but that's the price we have to pay to make up for a subsonic velocity."

"Wait… are you saying that you silenced an antimaterial rifle?" asked Sarah.

"Denny! Tommy! Get down here, and bring Vera!"

Two teenagers emerged from the shadows and made a 10-foot jump to the ground floor. Sarah was actually a little surprised that, with her experience of looking for threats in the dark recesses of abandoned buildings, she hadn't noticed them until now. Denny was obviously a deharnessed kid, and Tommy, only a few years older, just seemed to be superhumanly strong. In their hands they carried…

"Vera" was a very large bullpup-style rifle. Top-feeding magazine, appeared to be bolt-action and designed to be fired from one's shoulder, like a rocket launcher. One of the teens held the rifle while the other held the fat, shrouded barrel. It looked sort of like an old water-cooled machinegun, and Sarah guessed that the whole thing must have weighed about 48 pounds, not much less than her whole marching load.

"You silenced an anti-material rifle…"

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Palmetto Arms Heavy Sniper Rifle. In many ways it's an upscaled derivative of the Russian VKS sniper rifle. It is designed to engage skitters st up to six-hundred meters away, and can reliably bring down mechs or unsuspecting airships at three hundred meters. The integral suppressor gives it a report on par with a .22 short." [1]

Skitters, mechs, and airships, thought Sarah… is that what the government was calling them? She thought she had heard some dumb names before now…

And of course the other scouts were looking at it like it was meat and they were starving. For the last couple of days they had been attacking the automated killing machines with nothing but blunt instruments and courage. For a moment, Sarah felt just a little worried.

"And to answer your next questions: no, it's not for sale and, yes, you'll get gear at least as good once you reach the quarry…"

"Sergeant! We've got hostiles coming this way; I think it's time to go!"

No matter how big their guns were, the two squads weren't yet interested in an all-out battle with the enemy. They moved northeast to Highway 124, and then followed it north until they reached the quarry. Reinforcements were looking for them by this time, and with all the dead aliens left behind they weren't hard to follow.

* * *

"Backblast Clear!"

The oncoming "mechs" disintegrated from the blast of multiple M72 LAWs. Sarah and other riflemen fired M31 rifle grenades from the cover of the granite pile, while Green Berets in the tipple opened up with that BFG 9000 of theirs. The mechs were dealt with almost before they got off any shots … now to take care of the skitters.

Sarah was reloading when the first one hit their line, grabbing her rifle and thrusting it into her gut with nearly bone-breaking force. It was coming in for the kill when a hail of bullets tore through its side. Josh slammed the creature to the ground and bayoneted it repeatedly. With a rebel yell, he charged into the next one and gave it more of the same. The skitters began breaking away and trying to climb back up the wall, but the scouts were having none of that; they advanced and cut them down in the open.

"Did we win?" asked Sarah as she was helped back to her feet.

"Win?" exclaimed Sergeant Mueller "Killed fifty at least! Your people tore into them like a bunch of berserkers!"

They're good, she thought. Good and desperate; never back a man into a corner unless you want to know just how hard he can fight.

"One dead, two more wounded." said Josh "Think that's all of them? Any more reinforcements?"

"I doubt it." said a truck driver from the 11th Regiment. "Here we are in this deep hole in the ground. That group swarmed us because they thought we'd be an easy kill, and our company reports nothing else along 124 between here and Ronald Reagan Parkway."

"We've cleared the path, there's nothing left to stop us!" yelled Josh.

Over the chatter of the others, Sarah heard a low metallic hum in the distance that gradually gained in intensity. She hadn't heard it in many weeks, and wished she didn't know exactly what it was.

"That could stop us…"

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Originally I was going to have them use a version of the Russian VKS with its 12.7×55mm round (or the American .510 Whisper), but the energy delivered by them is just a little bit less than what I imagine to be reliable against mechs. A subsonic 20mm could probably do the job, but a 30mm definitely could.

Give the round about 360 grams of mass and assume that it travels 320 meters per second. If my math is right—and it may well not be—that gives you 18,432 joules of kinetic energy (similar to that of a normal .50 BMG). A subsonic round will have a lot of other problems that I don't have the math or ballistic skills to account for, but that should put a good dent in most Espheni hardware.


	11. Chapter 10: Vincere Nel Mori

**"Hard pressed on my right, my center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent; I attack."  
—Ferdinand Foch**

* * *

**4 September**  
**Arabia Mountain**  
**Four miles south of Lithonia, Georgia**

The area around Browns Mill Road and Arabia High School had been lost and retaken twice already, the building and woods burning wildly in spite of the light afternoon rain. The southern front of the 37th company was conducting a third, final retreat when they heard the noise of aircraft.

They came in low and fast. It was some kind of new variant; more dart-shaped and seemingly too small to be piloted by skitters. The weapons they carried were all too familiar; silver confetti that burst into blue-tinged fire as it fell on upon the retreating humans.

Private Hezekiah Payne ran with the remaining survivors through the creek and up the forested hillside. He dove for a cleft between two rocks as his surroundings burst into flames, flattening the forest in the blink of an eye. One of the humans fired at overflying Fighters, only to be shot down by an advancing Drone. He grasped for overhanging foliage and recommenced his climb up the muddy incline.

He saw Colonel Calvin Payne taking cover behind another granite boulder that for some reason had been reinforced with a log barricade, firing a Mosin-Nagant at the Warriors who came running at him in support of the Drones.

"Come on, get up here cuz! Hey, where's your rifle?"

"Lost it! I was out of ammo anyway."

He had thrown it down in terror when the bombing started, but he wasn't going to tell his cousin that. Calvin continued firing.

Bang! Bang! Click.

"Same with me. Here… help!"

He grabbed a bloodied axe from a fallen comrade and handed it to Hezekiah. A rocket slammed into a nearby tree, stinging them with splinters and almost bringing the trunk down on top of them. The nearest Drone was about twenty-five yards downhill from them now, and they went to work on the ropes that held their "barricade" together.

Down went the logs. The bipedal machine actually looked like it might hold its balance for a few seconds, but a piece of birch to the knee felled it and a big Georgia pine crumpled its brain. The two boys shouting in triumph; in all of this chaos, something had actually gone right.

"Yeah! Eat it, walkers! Like a bunch of Ewoks up in here!"

Some of the Warriors had climbed the trees and were jumping from on to the next. Through luck more than anything, Hezekiah slung his axe and nearly decapitated one as it dove at him from the side. Their small victory wouldn't be enough. Warriors had always handled hills and mud better than humans, and—vulnerability to stone-age traps notwithstanding—these Drones seemed to be handling the terrain a lot better than usual. Nothing to do but keep running.

* * *

One of the soldiers had loaded his slingshot with a rock painted to look like a grenade, and Major Clifton sprayed his BAR at the cluster of panicked aliens as they broke from cover. His hilltop position overlooked the ruins of the Dekalb County Police Firing Range, and on the reverse slope was a nice little hiking trail that had been the scene of vicious fighting that steadily drew closer to Arabia Mountain and the hospital staff. Half a mile between them and his family.

At fifty yards they started tossing a few old tear gas grenades someone had found at the firing range, frankly unsurprised that it did no good. They set fire to their tar pitch pots to conceal the various mantraps (mollusktraps?) and fell back yet again. Clifton was met by a mounted courier at the bottom of the hill.

"Captain Simmons says there's no hope in the south. She wants to rally on the mountaintop and press north towards Lithonia with everything we've got. Try to break into the clear."

With the little Drones still buzzing around? Maybe if the rain gets worse, otherwise we just die tired.

"No cover on the mountain. Tell her to rally at the visitor's center and hope to God that something changes before we start attacking."

* * *

From behind the line of wooden crates, Charlene Matlock fired her SU-16 at the oncoming enemy squad. It was hard to aim clearly with tears in her eyes, and it was hard not to weep after seeing her dad torn to shreds while saving a group of children.

The original plan had been for the young and infirm to take shelter in areas too swampy for the Drones to follow. That part was working fine, but it still left them at the mercy of the Warriors. They dragooned anyone who could use a gun or knife or stick into the defense of the camp; six-year-olds were put on the firing line while those too injured to stand were propped against trees.

One of the Warriors took a bullet in the leg and plunged headlong into their line. Denise Clifton and her squad of teenage fighters fell upon it, slamming her MAS-49 rifle into the back of its head while another Fighter went to work with a shovel. Another alien grabbed the shovelman and disemboweled him before clawing a ten-year-old's throat out. Charlene shot this one, but more were coming. The humans outnumbered them two to one, but they were killing humans at a rate of about three to one.

Captain Simmons opened fire on the Warriors; her scratch platoon waded through the muck against them even though less than half still had loaded rifles. This meager relief, to the surprise of everyone, seemed to be enough to drive them away.

" That worked!? I can't believe it!"

"Yeah," said Corporal Payne, "looks like the dead marshes belong to…"

The rain had stopped by now and aerial visibility was good. That was going to be a very big problem, as they heard the sound of aircrafting coming around for another bombing run.

Oh well, they had done the best they could do…

* * *

Master Sergeant Mark Ersin scanned the sky with his binoculars.

"Wait for it… wait… wait… FIRE!"

The enemy bombers were circling and climbing, perhaps getting ready for another ground attack. As they reached apogee, the guntruck opened up with quadmounted .50 caliber machineguns. The spray of lead filled the sky and swept away the two small planes. It bolted into cover as two more enemy ships fired missiles at it, and these were taken down by a hidden, trailer-mounted set.

The motorized column swarmed down Klondike Road—to the extent that a force of less than a score was capable of "swarming". They collected the scattered remnants of the 37th company as they went, passing out guns and ammo and turning them around to face their enemy in a fighting withdrawal. The horizontal rain of fire tore away at the enemy hordes; it was just enough to get the survivors to relative safety.

* * *

**4 September**  
**Lithonia, Georgia**

Sarah Tagliabue stumbled in a small rainwater-filled crater and dropped to her knees. The rain had been sporadic through the afternoon, but it was coming down pretty well now that the day came to a close, which at least would make it harder for the enemy to follow them. She wasn't sure if she was going to be able to get back up again; she wanted to just curl up and sleep for a little while, or maybe for eternity.

"Come on soldier, keep marching." said Robert Clifton, pulling her to her feet. He flagged down a truck and helped her into the back.

"What was the cost? How many did we lose?"

"Over a third." he said ruefully. "We did the impossible though. Thanks to those who died, we can do it again tomorrow, and the day after that, and for as many more days as it takes to finish this thing."

"Oh… " she said absently. "So, what now?"

"We fight on."


	12. Chapter 11: Homeward Bound

_"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."_  
-Psalm 23:4

* * *

***Diary Entry: 6:00 AM, Wednesday, September 7, 2011***

As rainy this morning as it has been all week, and at 60 degrees it's almost chilly.

That "Special Detachment" was an honest-to-God Special Forces team. Had some really cool gear and the skill to use it, they tore through the spiders and robots like nothing I've ever seen before. We fought our way to the quarry and brought the munitions back without too much trouble. And this really was manna from heaven: grenades, rockets, heavy rifles, machine guns, ammunition… and not a moment too soon.

The aliens have a new toy of their own. Some kind of aircraft that we think is unmanned, smaller but at least as deadly as the ones we're used to. They and the evermore-tinkered robots shattered the 37th's defensive positions and forced us into protracted, bloody melee combat. Only 200 of us got out alive, and a lot of those are wounded.

They didn't try to nuke us though, when in the past they normally would have. I have to wonder why that might be.

We've been hiding out in a trailer park northwest of Lithonia since the day before yesterday. We leave at sunrise. Major Clifton wants to head for Walton County and maybe go as far as the Athens area. The Special Forces team is going with them and on into the Carolinas, where a lot of the gifts we've been receiving apparently originate. I asked them about some of the weird rumors I've heard of the United States government reorganizing in that area, but all they could tell me is that things are still very amorphous, whatever that means.

And me, I'm going to Acworth. The people here hate to see me go, but it seems like C Company, if it still exists, is where I'm meant to be. Before they left, the truck drivers from the 11th Regiment told me that I should stick around Highway 124 as far as Snellville, then take Ronald Reagan Parkway to the west. They suggested trying to go above Woodstock, no idea if the Allatoona Lakebed could be crossed, beyond that they couldn't really give any directions and I was still somewhat dazed by the idea of there being a Ronald Reagan Parkway.

So… off I go, just three days of food, my gear, my rifle and me.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 10:23 AM, Wednesday, September 7, 2011***

Gone about 10 miles so far. Feet are hurting a little, but they don't feel numb and crushed like they did after the breakout from Arabia Mountain. Thank God I had a couple of days to recover.

Spiders are back in Centerville. Looks like they've occupied the place, and they seem to be doing… something with a lot of harnessed kids and cargo ships. Can't get close enough to see what.

There's a creek to the west of here and I'm going to follow it around the town. It's pretty swampy around there and it'll slow me down a little, but it should keep me out of trouble.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 2:50 PM, Wednesday, September 7, 2011***

Met another lone survivor in Snellville. Considered trying to talk to him, but he seemed kind of creepy and I'm frankly glad I had my walking stick in hand and my rifle over my shoulder. Add that to signs of recent spider activity and it's a good reason for me to stay on guard.

So… there's a Ronald Reagan Parkway and a Ronald Reagan Park? Good heavens, Gwinett County, just how Republican can you get?

At one time I would have made some snarky joke about our relative proximity to the School of The Americas, but that would seem sanctimonious now, seeing as I've probably done worse things than any Nicaraguan or Argentinean counterinsurgent. I do still get a little weirded out by places named after prominent people whose funerals I can distinctly remember. It's even worse when they want to memorialize people who haven't died, or haven't even left public office. No, California, you don't need to name so many charter schools after Barack Obama.[1]

Anyways…

I'm at the park now. Decided I'd wait here for awhile until the rain eased off, even though I should take advantage of the cover it offers. My foot doesn't…

_BANG!_

* * *

**7 September**  
**West of Snellville, Georgia**

Sarah instinctively hit the deck at the sound of the gunshot. Handgun, probably large-caliber, followed closely by yelling. She took her M14 and moved forward to see what was going on.

The man she had seen earlier was holding a revolver to the head of a teenage girl, struggling with her and demanding she give up her bag. Looked pretty straightforward. Of course she wasn't going to stand by while someone got mugged or worse, but she didn't really like the idea of making any more noise. So, how to resolve this situation with a minimum of fuss?

* * *

***Diary Entry: 7:35 PM, Wednesday, September 7, 2011***

That last resident of Snellville, Georgia from earlier? I ended up bayoneting him.

Found him trying to steal food from a teenage girl. He had already killed an older woman she was with (mother?) and, well, I could have probably stopped it without any more violence but I didn't want to risk leaving someone like that out there gunning for me.

The kid is understandably shaken up. First thing I had to do was convince her that I wasn't just another thief, then I suggested that she come with me to Acworth. She didn't entirely like the idea, but I told her we'd have a better chance of surviving if we stuck together. She agreed to go on the condition that I help bury her companion. Hasn't spoken a word since.

So, four hours to dig a grave, plus a few words for the departed. She had nothing to say for or against this. I wish I still knew one of the cemetery prayers, but I think I did well enough in singing a few words of Rock of Ages and reading the 23rd Psalm. Even said a silent little prayer for the dead mugger. Maybe his morality was as decayed as the houses in these subdivisions, and maybe he had gone as feral as the local dogs, but he was still human.

There's less than an hour of light left now, but I don't want to spend the night here. We'll move on down the road and hopefully find a good place to camp. I've spent a lot of time that could have been spent marching today and I'm pretty sure the kid is going to slow me down even more, but I think the extra set of eyes and ears will be worth it.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 11:05 AM, Thursday, September 8, 2011***

Cloudy today, but it didn't rain. Wasn't hot either, so maybe we're finally done with summer.

Lot of enemy activity when we snuck under I-85 at sunrise. Reached the Chattahoochee River a few minutes ago. This whole area was hit pretty hard when Lake Lanier went, not many trees or houses left standing.

Some men on horseback pointed us in the direction of a good place to cross. They also said that, if we want to get around the occupation forces in Alpharetta we'd be best off to keep going north along 141 until we reach Big Creek, and then veer west or northwest to find the units holding the Etowah River. Sounds like a plan.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 7:05 PM, Thursday, September 8, 2011*"**

"You don't die, the world just ends. It's a curse being alive these days."

My fellow traveler said that shortly after we stopped to camp in a house near Big Creek Elementary School. It's about all she's said today. She worries me.

There are a lot of corpses in this area. The school itself was used as a hospital early on and it looks like the dead were stacked up in a nearby field and left there, like crayons half-melted in the sun. After nine months of it, I barely notice things like that, but she does and it seems to really bother her. Wherever she was before, they must have kept her sheltered.

Oh well, I guess there are worse people I could team up with. At least she doesn't snore or try to steal the covers. Hehehe…

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Albania and Kosovo have statues to George W Bush and Bill Clinton respectively. Obama has one in the People's Republic of China. *snicker*

Iconoclast that I am, I have to agree that having things renamed for recently-deceased or even still-living national figures unnerves me a little. Naming new things after them doesn't seem quite as bad, and naming something for a politician who is still in office smacks of cult of personality (looking at you here, West Virginia.)


	13. Chapter 12: Threshold of Home

_"Remember Ishi? Kids still study the poor bastard? We did. Every time I drive north on I-5 and see the exit to Lassen National Park I think of him, hiding out in a creekbed for years after his whole world was wiped out. He did about as well as anybody will, when the aliens come, and he still had to go cringing up to them at the end, couldn't make it alone any more. They made a diorama out of him while he was still alive."_  
-War Nerd/John Dolan, Apocalypse Never[1]

* * *

**9 September**  
**Milton, Georgia**

They would be running out of food today, and neither woman had much body fat to burn. They found some bull thistle in a pasture and some cattails and water lilies growing in a flooded area behind a house, and then pine trees were everywhere,[2] and they both kept their eyes peeled for something to hunt.

Coming to a railroad crossing, Sarah Tagliabue dropped on all fours and pressed her nose to the tracks. She started sniffing vigorously, to the complete confusion of her new companion.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to track the train."

"Don't you usually use your ears for that?"

"Only if you want to know when the next one's coming. I'm trying to figure out when the last one made these tracks."

The girl took several seconds to ponder that comment, then she started laughing.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 6:00 PM, Friday, September 9, 2011***

Shot a feral dog today. Only had half a jaw left and looked like it was suffering pretty badly. Not a lot of meat on it but what little there was went into the stewpot. Teresa said she wasn't sure if it was kosher, but she ate anyway. She wasn't able to hold down the lily roots or pine cambium, but I really can't hold that against her.

That's her name, by the way. I got her talking, and Teresa MacNeil said that she and her mother were part of a group that got slaughtered by the aliens, and they were heading to the mountains when they got ambushed by someone whom she thought was trying to help her.

She's 15 years old, a little older than I thought. Seems to know how to handle the .357 Magnum I gave her but beyond that her survival skills leave something to be desired. She wants to keep going on alone when we reach my company. I don't know how well she expects to do by herself in the mountains with winter coming. I told her that I grew up in the mountains (close enough) and even I wouldn't try surviving there by myself, I would find some river bottoms or head for the coasts. She hasn't said much since then.[3]

We walked through an area called Hickory Flat today. Lot of horse farms, woodlands and low-density housing around here, Teresa said it had a pleasant "rural" feel to it, showing that she has no idea what rural really is.[4]

The area is fairly nice I guess. There's still a trace of human habitation here, and we met a militia unit patrolling the intersection of East Cherokee Drive. Same story we've heard elsewhere; the main line of resistance is above Canton on the Etowah River.

We're sleeping in the woods off the highway tonight. She wants a bigger firepit but I decided against it. Better to be a little cold than be rooted out by spiders, and I keep hearing that their aerial heat-seeking equipment keeps getting better and better. We should make Acworth tomorrow, though I get a sinking feeling that they've moved further north by now.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 6:35 PM, Saturday, September 10, 2011***

Getting warm again. It was back up into the 80's today even though it's still in the 60's or even 50's at night. I do not like these wild temperature fluctuations!

Didn't make Acworth. Got jumped by a 'bot and some spiders on the railroad near Holly Springs. Teresa took a bit of shrapnel in the arm and shoulder but she'll be okay. I was impressed to see her drop two of the things and wounding another before running out of ammunition. Apparently she used to be a target pistol shooter. Maybe she'll do better than I gave her credit for.

We had to run in the wrong direction for some half a mile before we were sure they were off our trail. So then we had to (cautiously) backtrack and continue on our way. We crossed Little River before sundown and now we're taking shelter behind a bombed-out restaurant, surrounded by what must have been some very opulent subdivisions before they burned. I'd like to talk about our plans for Sunday, but then I should probably remember that whatever it is I plan on doing tomorrow, the enemy gets a vote too.

* * *

**12 September, 2011**  
**Acworth, Georgia**

Sarah swept the sweat from her face as she looked around the ruins.

"Whoever was here, they're long gone. Been seeing a lot of bombers heading north, so I guess that's where they went."

She looked back at Teresa, who followed behind and clutched a long piece of rebar that she now used as her primary weapon.

"There's some people in our company closer to your age. You would like them."

"Maybe, if they're not dead." said Teresa. "That's what happens now; the aliens find you, and they kill you. That's why I want to go to the mountains, find a place to hide."

Sarah shrugged. "I don't think we can hide any more. We sure couldn't at Arabia Mountain. What we need to do is kill enough of them that we don't have to hide anymore."

They heard the sound of another bomber patrol. This one was going to be coming close by, and there weren't many good spots for them to take cover.

"Come on."

* * *

**12 September, 2011**  
**Two miles east of Acworth, Georgia**

A double lane of rail, a three-lane state highway and a small residential drive were squeezed into a cut in the terrain between two levelled lines of storefront. The little concrete valley was boxed by a collapsed overpass where Staff Sergeant Skitter had entrenched the bulk of his platoon.

"Alright, some of you people are new and I don't trust any of you so pay attention: arms, legs, then the cabeza!"

"You ever think you enjoy these turkey shoots a bit too much, rufião!?" asked Lieutenant Ferreira.

"Hey, life hands you lemons," he pumped a shotgun shell into the chamber "you blow its friggin' head off!"

The humans opened fire on the first wave of Spiders to come running at them. Down they went, but more followed behind. Several leapt through the air as they charged forward, but others hung back to call in artillery and, in all likelihood, bombers. Explosions blossomed amongst the ruble and in the air. As more robots came forward to offer direct fire support, the human position became all the more untenable.

"Platoon, fall back!" yelled Ferreira.

The humans ran, and the enemy pursued; apparently there were still a few dumb enemy commanders left.

As the Spiders and their machines surged forward, two previously-hidden fireteams made themselves known. Two rounds from the Palmetto Arms Light Mechbusters slammed into the flanks of the Robots, destroying them and killing a few aliens in the blast. The rest of the platoon wheeled around and engaged the survivors, cutting them down in the crossfire.

"Yeah! Love myself some Carolina Panzerfausts!" yelled Skitter.

"Cease fire, everyone!" yelled Ferreira "Quit shooting and let's move out, we got four minutes tops before their air support shows up!"

Skitter looked over the troops. None dead or seriously injured, which meant he'd probably lose a whole fireteam on the next one. Well, back into hiding; more of the same tomorrow.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 6:35 PM, Monday, September 12, 2011***

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of something that we used to call world-changing. We humans have ten digits which are easily accessible for counting, and therefore most of us would consider this anniversary somehow weightier than the ninth or eleventh. If we were Mayans we might feel the need to take off our shoes when we count. I wonder if an alien species, with only three tactile digits on each hand, feels the need to use its toes.

Anyway, between that and it being a day of rest, we decided not to travel yesterday. We scavenged, foraged, and I read from my pocket Bible. Teresa doesn't seem particularly religious, but I think she did like that.

We made it to Acworth at about mid-day today. It looks like one of those "day after" scenes from the history books: Atlanta after 1865, San Francisco in 1906. Dresden in '45… Quebec after the '98 ice storm (as an eight year old stranded on my way to grand-maman's, I did not at all enjoy that one).

Teresa found out that I'm half-Acadian, by the way. Her family is from British Columbia and, well, I haven't heard the end of it… it's almost as bad as being around Skitter.

We're not far from the Etowah here. The riverbanks themselves were pretty thououghly scoured when the dam burst, but the area immediately beyond them is covered in lots of flotsam and jetsam that gives you plenty of places to hide. I think it's now a sort of no-man's-land with both sides raiding and probing at each other.

I heard some shooting on the way up. There might have been enough daylight left to try and meet up with whoever was doing it, but I didn't feel like walking into a firefight unannounced and in reduced visibility. I've seen enough blue-on-blues in my time to want to avoid it.

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Ishi was one of the last American Indians thought to have spent most of his life in traditional, uncontacted culture. Most of his tribe was wiped out in 1865, and he and a handful of others lived in the Sierra wilderness for 40 more years. He emerged starving from the mountains in 1911 at the age of 50, after the remaining members of his tribe had all died. Contracted tuberculosis while living in Los Angeles and died in 1916.

2\. The soft layer of cambium between the bark and the wood of a pine or birch tree is edible. Can be eaten raw, boiled, roasted, or even ground up for use as flour. Common famine food in medieval times up through World War II. Taste ranges from bad to decent, depending on the tree.

3\. Sarah is speaking rhetorically here; of course a place with difficult terrain like mountains or swamps would be the best place to hide out in the event of a major war—Montani Semper Liberi. She's right in the sense that surviving alone in the highlands requires a level of skill and experience that most modern (and pre-modern) people simply don't have. And the ones who do have it generally wouldn't want to go solo if they didn't have to.

4\. Hickory Flat was one of the last areas in southern Cherokee County to fall to The Sprawl, so it still has a more rural feel than many of the surroundings. It is pretty built-up at this point; probably inhospitable in the event of a collapse.


	14. Chapter 13: Battle of Allatoona

_"I am short a cheek bone and one ear, but am able to whip all Hell yet."_  
\- Brig. Gen. John M. Corse, US Army

* * *

**13 September, 2011**  
**Etowah River**  
**South of Cartersville, Georgia**

Another morning and their spirits were high. Sarah waved down the first human patrol she saw and walked slowly toward them.

"Hello there. Can I help you?" asked their leader.

"I hope so. I'm Sergeant Sarah Tagliabue, C Company, 12th Regiment. I'm looking to rejoin my unit."

"First Lieutenant Johnny Hendrix. D Company, 12th Regiment."

"I remember you! You were with us at Plant McDonnough."

"I remember helping haul that bullet-riddled truck of yours. Good to see you alive, Tag. Captain Hall is stationed just above where the Interstate crosses the river."

"That's great! Can you take me to him?"

"That's close enough!" he said, raising one hand to halt the two travelers and placing the other on his sidearm. Sarah was so surprised that she almost jumped backwards.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but unless someone can vouch for where you've been and how long you've been gone, you'll need to be checked out before we let you back into our lines."

"Checked out? Has there been some kind of pandemic?"

"No, I'm afraid it's much worse than that. Corporal Carter can give y'all a full briefing on the way to C Company's containment ward."

"Sarah," said Teresa "what did you get me into?"

* * *

***Diary Entry: 3:15 PM, Tuesday, September 13, 2011***

Eww! They're putting worms in our eyes!

Apparently people really were kidnapped by the Slendermen. They came back seemingly fine, except for long periods of time missing from their memories. And a close examination revealed… things… floating around in the outer layer of their eyes. We don't know what these things are capable of, whether they're for surveillance or outright control of infected individuals, or maybe something else entirely. Whatever the purpose, most militia units now have a rule that unannounced visitors spend at least a day, preferably three, under quarantine before they're fully trusted. Can't say I fault the logic.

Anyone who actually does get a human lojack dug out of his head (it's apparently a very simple procedure, only a few people have been blinded by it) is put under long-term observation at an offsite location. Or at least that's what I was told.

At least I'm back. Has it really been a month and a half? Captain Hall is glad to see me, says he'll put me back to work as soon as he can. C Company has 128 personnel, of which 112 are "combat effective", and the definition of that term has changed a little from what I remember… I have an 8-year old with an M-16 guarding my new semi-private accommodations.

Ever since they managed to shake off their pursuers in Douglas County, this and the units have essentially been reenacting the Atlanta Campaign in reverse. There were major battles around Kennesaw, Marietta and Dallas, but for the most part they've been falling back, holding till flanked and falling back again. We hope to make a stand here on the Etowah like we did on the Chattahoochee, but that'll only work if we're ready for the enemy once they get ready to cross. When we're not busy fortifying the river bank, we've been raiding and ambushing their forces to try and slow them down. That's what Staff Seargeant Skitter is doing now, he's on a long-range patrol and he should get back the day after tomorrow.

Teresa is still here. She wants to keep going but I think I've convinced her to stick around for a little while. At least long enough to get some more food and some more ammunition for her gun, and maybe make sure she doesn't any freaky little alien worms in her. Heck, maybe she'll like us enough to stay long-term. If we can't hold the river, it would only be natural that we head for the mountains.

Maybe we'll hold the river.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 1:45 PM, Wednesday, September 14, 2011***

The area that was once a lake had once been a mountainous railroad pass. Getting through it was so daunting that Sherman took his army through the mountains instead. There was a small town in the pass that became a Union Depot and was later raided by Confederates. The Union defenders held, even though their commander was wounded and they lost a third of their forces.

We still have the remains of an old iron furnace and the stone pillars of a Civil War-era bridge, targeted during the Great Locomotive Chase, burned six times during the war. Further down the river we have the Etowah Indian Mounds built by we're-not-entirely-sure-who. And then of course there's various ruins and junk all over the place from suburban America, the last civilization to die here. The ghostly foundations of the towns of Etowah and Allatoona are still visible on the old lake bed. The spiders have been trying to push north from that area but they're not having much progress due to the forested, weedy bluffs that used to be lakefront property on either side. Sherman was wise to go around it.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 4:00 PM, Thursday, September 15, 2011***

"When did you turn black?"

Sergeant John "Skitter" Bishop, in all his typical tact and subtlety, asked me that when he first saw me. Wasn't really sure how to respond to it, as I don't think my skin is any darker now than it was when I left. If anything, it should start getting lighter in the next few months.

I can thank my black grandfather for the fact that I tend to tan where others burn, and boy is it an ugly sight when these Anglo-Celtic Southerners burn. I guess it makes up for the keloids and the unmanageable hair. Of course I almost never tanned before now, growing up in cloudy northern Maine and spending most of the summer before last indoors at Georgia Tech. I actually thought looking too dark might be a problem down here. As in, thinking I'd get lynched if anyone outside the "safe parts" of Georgia found out I was biracial.

Turns out… not really. I mean, no worse than speaking English while visiting family in Quebec or being from a hick town while visiting family in Chicago. We didn't get to visit family very often, I don't think either side ever fully forgave my parents for their choice of spouse.

Anyway…

...there are 8 regiments from Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee spread along the river between here and Kingston. That sounds like a lot, and it is when you consider that we only have 11 active in all of Northwest Georgia, but do remember that each regiment only has about five fully-functional companies now, and most of those are slightly understrength like ours.

We're reasonably wealthy from an equipment standpoint. Air raids are still an issue but we have enough anti-aircraft artillery that they can't hope to hurt us without taking heavy losses of their own. This company has two twin-mounted 20mm guns on horse- or vehicle-drawn trailers. Seem to be homemade, only a little cruder than the stuff coming out of South Carolina.

We also have three 60mm mortars, now that the nukes aren't as much of a concern. Sometimes the robots come close enough to lob volleys of rockets at us, and we return fire with the mortars or, at longer range, a couple of 105mm guns under the command of the regiment. Here too, they could hurt us if they wanted, but they'd have to get closer than they've so far been willing.

Best change of all? Undoubtedly, the bagpipes. We've got ourselves a pipe major, and there are plans to have one assigned to every company of the Georgia Militia. I don't know what effect that'll have on the enemy but, by God, it terrifies me.

Quarantine ends tomorrow. I don't know what they'll have me do since they don't really need any squad leaders right now, but anything has to be better than sitting around in this tent.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 12:20 AM, Saturday, September 17, 2011***

Been assigned as fireteam leader in Charlie Squad, 4th platoon. Bit of a step down in command but I can't complain. We're going on patrol below Emerson tonight, should be back in three days.

* * *

**Along Pumpkinvine Creek**  
**Two miles south of Emerson, Georgia**  
**17 September, 2011**

Sergeant Sarah Tagliabue held her rifle close as she cautiously moved through the dark woods. They had heard reports of harnessed kids scavenging in the nearby junkyard and intended to check it out come sunrise. They also knew that the area was heavily traveled by Spider Columns. The creek cut deeply through the hills here and it had the makings of a great ambush spot.

Private Hayes was on point and Private Blake covered their six with shotguns. Greg and Bo Keller were directly behind her with M4 carbines and the squad's heavy rifle, a Beretta 455 double-barreled elephant gun chambered for .470 Nitro Express. Two other riflemen carried M14s. Almost all of them carried BTU-style rifle grenades and smoke or flash hand grenades. Corporal Holt's fireteam off to their side was similarly equipped, except they sported a DShK machinegun instead of a heavy rifle.[1]

"This'll do, boys and girls" said the Squad leader. "The sun will be up in a couple more hours. Rest if you can, we dig in at first light."

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. For those who've forgotten or are just now tuning in, C Company organizes most of its thirteen-man squads into two six-man fireteams, instead of the more familiar four-man fireteams. Fireteams themselves are often divided into two-man binomes or three-man cells, with one or two experienced soldiers being paired up with new recruits. Those wondering why the teams are organized in this manner should see my previous comments in Chapter 5 of Heat of the Summer, Act II of Atlanta Burns Again.


	15. Chapter 14: Air Cover

_"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"_  
-George C. Wallace

* * *

***Diary Entry: 18:40, Tuesday, September 20, 2011***

First mission since I got back, two dead and three seriously wounded.

I went out with the squad, just like old times. We were going to try laying out some booby traps for the enemy to stumble upon, and maybe launch a direct ambush or two.

Problem is, a number of the spider columns have a bunch of harnessed kids marching around with them (armed harnessed kids, just like the ones we saw in Smyrna). So we have to be very careful with our booby-traps or explosives. And we didn't see a single convoy that didn't have at least a couple of those little bombers watching over it. Whatever else we did, those had to be taken down first.

We found what looked like a good place for an ambush, a deep creek valley with a partially-destroyed road running along the side, forcing the enemy to march down it almost single file. Our snipers and machine gunners engaged the planes first and then moved on to the robots. One of our better grenadiers got in close and dropped a shell where it could kill some of the enemy without causing collateral damage (at over 200 yards, an impressive feat). Those of us with rifles started firing at the spiders at 450 yards while rockets and bullets fell harmlessly around our fighting positions (well, not harmlessly, we had one significant injury from the shrapnel). A few members with bean-bag loaded shotguns moved forward in hopes of taking the kids alive.

Then the ridge we were on exploded.

There were about five enemy craft, and we hadn't been there for more than a couple of minutes. It's a good thing our squad leader picked a place with an easy egress. We jumped into a deep ravine and were able to clear the area before they could make a second pass on us. Their ground forces don't seem like they were able to follow us in the thick woods.

We brought our dead and wounded back across the river yesterday. Left a few cells behind to snipe and observe, and they returned a couple of hours ago.

So, our situation is… problematic. "Screwed and blued" is how Skitter so eloquently put it after losing one of his own men in a similarly-botched ambush. We can't keep operating at the cost of one or two dead per mission. We could go to long-range sniping only, drop one or two hostiles and run away before their bombers have a chance to respond, but that won't significantly slow them down. So I don't know what we'll do.

Incidentally, when we first opened fire on the column, I think I saw a couple of the robots DUCK FOR COVER and return fire from behind a pile of fallen timbers. I could be wrong on this, but if that is what I saw then it means that they've learned yet another profile-reducing trick for us to deal with.

Captain Hall says the bombers are a problem, and one that Colonel Berry is likely to talk to us about tomorrow evening. He suggested that we pick up the discussion then.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 21:00, Wednesday, September 21, 2011***

Raining tonight. Coming down pretty hard, too.

The small bombers ("beamers", they're being called) are faster, more agile, and seem to have better sensors than the big ones. Smaller payloads but still enough to plaster ground units, especially since they seem to come in bigger groups. These are things we already knew.

But Colonel Berry apparently has a research team working on a few recovered specimens, and they've learned some new things about them. They're bio-mechanical for one thing, they seem to be piloted by underdeveloped harnesses. That could mean that they can work at their full potential even without having a spider in close proximity, unlike the fully-mechanical robots.

[Remember that we suspected and in some cases knew that a lot of the original bombers went into battle on autopilot. This usually happened in strategic bombing runs, when they went out after targets that were unlikely to move or shoot back.]

Their navigation signals seem to come from somewhere close by, but not directly from units on the ground. We suspect that some of the new structures we've seen going up might have something to do with it. Finding and eliminating an alien ATC station could make things a lot easier for us.

…there is one other thing we learned from the Colonel. The Slendermen really have been offering to negotiate with us. The deal is that hostilities will end if we relocate to "protected areas" of some kind. It's as simple as that: go where we say, hand in your guns, quit fighting, and all will be well for you.

And we've got some big mounds in this area built on the bones of people who tried to take a deal like that. No, if you're fighting an existential war, you keep fighting until one side or the other's dead.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 07:30, Thursday, September 22, 2011***

Still raining and cloudy this morning, hominy and meat stew for breakfast. The stew was mostly venison and bear I think. I haven't had bear since I was a child, and I don't remember it tasting this good.

We had walnuts too, but I found them to be only barely edible. I don't think they left them to dry long enough. They say we'll have acorn pancakes and sorghum syrup tomorrow. It is nice to be home.

Captain Hall and I spoke after we were done eating. We had been talking about the deharnessed members of our militia, and he wants to know if I trusted them. I was honest about my misgivings, but I did note that if the Slenders are still pulling their strings, I would expect them to miss more often. He agreed, though he did say something to me that I don't feel comfortable repeating here.

[Update: that would be the fact that the hardened skin which formed directly around the severed spikes seems to be spreading in some cases. Further investigation would ultimately reveal that this was not a serious medical or security problem. So we're told.]

* * *

***Diary Entry: 20:00, Thursday, September 22, 2011***

About half of my fireteam got poached for sniper and recon duty. I'm going to be assigned to first squad soon. In the meantime… we go fishing.

Do you know why the rivers in North Georgia have so many black walnut trees growing along their banks? Because the Creek and Cherokee planted them here. In the fall, they would collect the nuts while the husks were still green, grind them down as finely as possible, and pour them into slow-moving parts of the river. The husks contain rotenone, an organic chemical commonly used to treat scabies and head lice in livestock and humans. It's also a very useful organic pesticide, insecticide and psicide.

That's "fish poison" for you non-CBE majors. They even built big V-shaped dams (weirs) to help funnel the stunned fish into their baskets. We used their trees and one of those ancient weirs today to try and store away some food for winter. Brought home a good 60 pounds of fish.[1]

We also collected a few crawfish that had decided to take shelter in some car tires that the company had planted when they first got here. Maybe the mix of old and new food-trapping methods will keep us from starving come winter.

Incidentally, pokeweed is another good source of rotenone. That's why you have to boil the stuff three times before you can eat it.[2] Something else I learned… it leaves nigh-unwashable stains on human skin. Now my hands look like I've spent the last month washing in mud. Eww!

* * *

***Diary Entry: 13:45, Friday, September 23, 2011***

First day of fall today. And, in Georgia, fall means rain.

Thunderstorm today. Heavy rain this morning, visibility was down to about a third of a mile.

The spiders have arrived in force on the far side of the river. They haven't approached our positions on this side yet, but I can't imagine they'll wait long. Not with this good assault weather we're having.

In the meantime, they have us digging in the mud and getting ready for the onslaught. We've even taken a few barrels full of explosives and incendiaries to sink into the river, just like we did at the Chattahoochee. I wonder if the enemy remembers the Chattahoochee…

I hear that we're hoping to hold here indefinitely, but I also hear that we expect to eventually fall back to secondary defences along the Coosawattee River, in north Gordon County. I don't know what the overall strategy is, but I do know that the Coosawattee is almost 30 miles away. Falling back that far means we lose Calhoun and Jasper, and it would leave a lot of valuable farmland in enemy hands.

People who've been on the other side recently are reporting a new upgrade on some of the robots. They have several vertical tubes on their backs that look like some kind of improved indirect-fire system. So they're packing mortars now? That's a reassuring thought.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 20:00, Saturday, September 24, 2011***

Well, it was another dark and stormy day today. For a minute there I thought the war was going to start again, but there's been only one significant event to report:

A big force of enemy spiders came up Interstate 75 with heavy robot and bomber support. They stopped just beyond our heavy weapons range, spent a few minutes giving us ugly looks, and then fell back as artillery shells started landing.

Well, what was that all about? Why don't they attack us?

* * *

***Diary Entry: 04:00, Sunday, September 25, 2011***

bcause theyd rthr go aftr Kingstn. Oh.

off 2 briefing nw. wll rite mor l8r

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. While making sushi from poisoned fish is probably a bad idea, the amount of rotenone that gets in the meat would be miniscule, and cooking it should be sufficient to keep you safe.

And, frankly, if you're worried about getting poisoned by what you eat in modern America then you probably shouldn't be eating fish (or, per Joel Salatin, much of anything else) in the first place.

There is some evidence that heavy rotenone exposure to one's skin can lead to Parkinson's disease, so wear gloves.


	16. Chapter 15: Knights of Sherwood

_"These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape."_  
-Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

* * *

They never look up.

They may take an upward glance every now and then, but they never really look; months spent fighting against us, and the humans still don't fully realize that we can climb.

He silently jumped from one tree to the next as they moved on through the woods. He was fairly certain that he could have dropped down and slayed them all single-handedly, not that he dare try. He had lost a leg and the use of one arm from the last time humans had caught him alone. In any event, his job now was to observe, not to destroy.

From his temporary perch, he wondered if the plans had any real hope of success. The humans were certainly resilient; among the most resilient races the Espheni had ever encountered. They were also spiteful, and perhaps that more than anything was the reason was the reason why they continued fighting when they had lost so much already and there was no foreseeable hope of ever reclaiming their planet. If that was the case, then could they ever see his kind as anything but aggressors? Were they even capable of it? There was only one way to find out, and it would mean risking everything that he and the others had been working for since the time of their awakening.

One of the creatures stopped and looked up at him. It was the human party's hybrid—a freakish creature, very dangerous in close quarters; enslaved and selectively-bred by the humans to serve them in war, toil, and occasionally as a source of food.

Perhaps that was what he should be talking to.

* * *

**25 September, 2011**  
**3 miles east of Rome, Georgia**

"C'mon, Lonny. There's nothing up there!"

The miniature pack mule knew there was something in the trees. A predator of some kind too, and he wanted to stay perfectly still in the hopes that it wouldn't notice him. But the humans wanted to go, and the predator seemed to be quickly moving away, so he reluctantly agreed to continue moving.

"Just keep your eyes open." said Kate. "As thick as these woods are… they'll come from above if they try to close with us."

The Daughters of Thunder tethered Lonny and began work on a sniper hide. They were on top of a small hill overlooking a large river-bottom hayfield; a light mist was rising off the Etowah River immediately to the south and the Rome Bypass was about half a mile to the west. The sun was coming up behind them and the fields were glistened brilliantly in the morning dew. The conditions were pleasant if you could ignore the scattered gunfire and explosions; it was a good day for a hunt.

The crabs were surging north from the river and west from the highway. Most of the Atmarga Column had broken into a small screening force with orders were to engage targets of opportunity along the southwest flank. If they found anything particularly juicy, they were to use their newly-issued AN/PRC-6 walkie-talkies to call in an artillery barrage.

"Think we'll really be able to use that radio?" asked Colleen "I mean, without any of the shells falling on us?"

"I don't know." Said Kate "Do you remember what to do with these grid coordinates? I don't think I do."

"Either way, I'm glad we have radios now. Technology's making a comeback…"

There was movement in the trees separating one of the fields. Both girls raised their binoculars—crabs, at least six of them. They had a Walker with them, but the girls both figured they could take them all before its backpack-mortars got their range.

"…maybe soon we'll have something better to do this with… ray guns and jet packs!"

Kate chuckled, then she shook her head. "We don't need new technology for this. Browning and Lonny will do just fine."

* * *

About a mile to the north, Sergeant Tagliabue dropped to her butt and rode the shifting, newly-fallen leaves to the bottom of the little wash. The rest of her squad followed down with a similar lack of grace, some clearly enjoying the slide more than they should have in the midst of battle.

C Company had disembarked near the intersection of Kingston Highway and Freeman Ferry Road. Enemy forces were said to be scattered in this area, screening what appeared to be their primary advance up Calhoun Highway towards Shannon. Their goal was to sweep them from the area and hopefully drive them back to their starting position behind State Loop 1.

They made contact in a valley with an overgrown logging trail at the bottom. Spiders leapt from the foliage and into the shotgun barrels of the human scouts, four Robots rose from cover and fired at the humans, who responded with heavy rifles and mechbusters. Two Robot went down, one was crippled and the last managed to "sprint" into better cover. It was firing prone in a position that made it almost impossible to engage, and a fresh swarm of Spiders steadily advanced under the covering fire.

While most of the company gave ground, Sarah's squad was ordered to crawl under a tangled thicket of Chinese privet and hit the enemy in their flank with rifle-grenades. Not as hard for Spiders to navigate as rivercane or kudzu, but hopefully hard enough that they would forget to account for it. They still had a bad habit of forgetting that humans could crawl.

* * *

Captain Sony Stack bent down low as his horse trotted between a couple of weeping willows. Bringing her to a stop, he raised his M16 and drew a bead on a running crab. Three rounds stitched across its legs and torso and three more seemed to finish it; he was glad that they had been given a chance to resupply their ammunition before battle this time.

"Second platoon, dismount here! The rest of us will stay in place for now, you scout ahead on foot."

"What's the plan, sir?" asked Sergeant Gardener "March west till we reach the bypass?"

"As good a plan as any, better than some." he said.

The actual plan was still one of screening and harassment, but now they were being told to move forward where they could. Infantry companies had started to arrive in force from Gordon County and the local commanders wanted to reverse the direction of the battle before nightfall. He would have rather continued to fall back to the hills in front of Dykes Creek, but bigger forces were in play; the Tennesseans holding Shannon and the Alabamans assaulting Highway 53 were under a lot of pressure, and an advance on Rome's peripheries would help relieve them while still keeping troops on hand should new developments occur to the south in Lindale or Euharlee.

Sergeant Gardener didn't know where any of the other units were, and wasn't entirely sure where he was. The series of high wooded hills and deep craggy hollers with their seasonal streams feeding into the nearby river made this area extremely difficult for coordinating large forces. It was apparent why the fighting here during the Civil War had consisted more of skirmishes than battles.

Back in the woods, they followed the top of a ridge and came to an open, grassy swath that must have marked a natural gas pipeline. The cavalrymen immediately came under fire as they tried to cross; they fell back amongst the trees to find two groups of Crabs attacking on both flanks. Alien mortar shells began thudding all around them; Gardener ordered them further back as Captain Stack moved the main body forward to cover their retreat from the impact zone. He thanked his sergeant for finding a fight for them as their own guns started to respond.

* * *

Three Spiders burst from the collapsed mobile home and tore over the top of the human fireteam. Steams of crimson arced high into the sky and mixed in the morning dew, there was the sound of bones snapping as a point man was cast aside, his comrades responded with a wild volley of rifle fire as they broke for the overgrown pasture and the woods beyond. Their run for freedom was short-lived, however; multiple truck-mounted machineguns butchered them alive as they tried to flee.

Sergeant Tagliabue made sure her wounded were cared for before working to clear the rest of the trailer park. She almost fainted when an errant mortar round burst just a few yards away. It was only smoke, and not white phosphorus; she counted yet another blessing and forced herself forward.

The main line of battle was much further ahead, but a large number of Spiders had gone to ground in this area and it was up to two platoons of C company to root them out. They had spent the better part of their afternoon in this nerve-wracking task. And through the sound of diesel engines. cracking rifles, and exploding shells, their pipe major continued to blare some old march named for a famous river in France. Sarah couldn't help but marvel how a war against Crawfish from Outer Space just seemed to be getting weirder and weirder.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 20:00, Sunday, September 25, 2011***

Weather is screwy this time of year. Monsoon rain and gale-force winds one day, blazing heat the next. The trees look like they're burning with all the different reds and yellows in their leaves. Very pretty, but soon they'll be gone and I'll bet we're going to miss the lack of overhead cover.

We reached Kingston before dawn and promptly started to advance through some of the thickest terrain I've fought in to date. The area to the east of Rome is still very rural. It was apparently known as Sherwood Forest at one point and that seems very fitting.

It seems that the enemy is focusing on the town of Shannon rather than Kingston. They've made a narrow advance along Highway 53 and we're hoping to pinch it off with an aggressive assault on Rome. We want to push them back as far as the Oostanaula River, then return back to our own river below Cartersville, but the situation right now is changing so fast that I can't be sure what the long-term plans are. We reached State Loop 1 just before sunset and we hope to make it into downtown Rome in the next couple of days.

One last thing worth noting… there are a lot of prominent hills and ridges around the City of Rome (seven of them, same as the Italian city for which this one is named) and the spiders are doing… something on a few of them. Could be fortifications or firebases of some kind, or more of those alien ATC stations we've been hearing about. So maybe I'll get to climb a hill and blow up one of them.


	17. Chapter 16: The Scouring of Coosa Valley

_"This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time."_  
-Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

* * *

***Diary Entry: 21:19, Monday, September 26, 2011***

I'm tired and I'm wet and I'll have to do it all over again tomorrow.

Rained and thundered all last night, and it looks like we'll see more of that tonight. It was foggy for most of the morning and we used that to our advantage on several fronts.

The spiders are trying to break back into Rome now that their northwest advance is turning against them, and there's a big fight going on in an area called Berwin. There was a series of assaults on Jackson and Blossum Hill and other ridges overlooking the Oostanaula River, with humans and spiders fighting over hillside earthworks dating back to the Civil War. The Tennesseans are taking a lead role in that, while the Alabamans are trying to fight their way east along Highway 20. Best of luck to both of them.

C Company pushed over the defences along the Rome Bypass and as far as Sherwood Forest Baptist Church this evening, and that's where we'll be camping tonight. The area inside the bypass can best be described as "older working-class residential", though the parts near the river might have been newer and more high-dollar. Fires have blackened a lot of the areas that weren't flooded (and some of those that were), and the incessant rain has us trudging through knee-high muck in some places. The river is out of its banks and giving the area a good soaking, as was fairly common before the building of the levees and Alatoona Dam.

The going has been slow thanks to the terrain, weather, and fierce but uncoordinated enemy resistance. There was an airstrike against A Company last night but beyond that most of the air power is being focused on Berwin and the ridges. We hope to fight them back to the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula River by the middle of the week. We might go west to drive the Spiders out of Shorter College, or north or south to help dislodge them from the high ground. It depends on how things are going with the other fronts. If all goes according to plan we should be back in Cartersville by the end of the week.

Things never go according to plan.

* * *

**26 September, 2011**  
**Coosa, Georgia**

"Stupid Arab gun, why won't you load!?"

Private Blaine Cantrell let loose a string of invective at his 60-year piece of Middle Eastern steel. The Alabama Expeditionary Force had recently been issued a lot of Hakims, ZH29's and FN49's to make up for a hopefully-temporary shortage in 7.62x51mm ammunition. Private Cantrell still hadn't figured out the antiquated feeding system, and he was still smarting at a bad case of "Garand thumb"[1] it had given him earlier.

"Give me that and watch closely!" yelled Corporal Michael Weaver, grabbing the gun and loading the 10-round stripper clip. Having once owned an SKS, he was more familiar with the concept.

Weaver was covered in what he hoped was just red-tinged mud by the time he got out of what had once been an industrial waste pond. Much of the land between the coal plant and paper mill was a shallow mud lake, thick with floating bits of plastic, paper, wood, a half-sunken car, and more than a few corpses.

A number of Mechs and Skitters emerged from the ruins of the paper mill. The squad took positions behind a retaining wall and opened fire on them, joined by rifle grenades and their company's ZB53 machinegun.

The Alabama Expeditionary Force was fighting for ground they had lost the night before. Their artillery on Turnip Mountain and the enemy's on Horseleg Mountain churned away at the terrain between them, making endless mounds of rubble from the two facilities and the housing that surrounded it. The formerly busy and prosperous Coosa Valley was turning into an ashen Hellscape, with not one brick on top of another along the highway between Plant Hammond and Shorter College.

Michael saw a blossom of blue-tinged fire in front of him and dove beneath a burned-out log trailer; the beamer walked its rockets over the men on the ground below. On the nearby Coosa River, the heavy guns on one of their improvised barges opened up on the airborne threat, shredding it in a spectacular fireball. Mortar rounds from one of the other barges began falling in front of them and the Alabamans sprinted forward behind the barrage. The paper mill would soon be secured; there were plenty more lifeless ruins to fight over.

* * *

**26 September, 2011**  
**Jackson Hill, Rome, Georgia**

Riding across the battlefield with his company HQ, Staff Sergeant Ritchie Keating had to admit that the summit gave a good view of the city, not that much of it was left to see. The dead lay on top of each other along the trench lines, with little streams of red and purple blood slowly dripping back down to the river.

The Gordon County Home Guard had been sent in to help reinforce the two Tennessee regiments. Both were suffering heavy attrition and hospitalization rates—not from enemy fire so much as from the Murine Typhus that seemed to so love a dirty, post-apocalyptic warm autumn in Northwest Georgia's river valleys.

More barges from upstream were offloading troops at the aptly-named Ridge Ferry Park behind them. On the other side of the hill, the enemy was trying to take up defences behind Reservoir Street. They would be driven further back by evening; they were still not all that good at holding trenches, even though they got better by the day.

"Any idea what happened to that big lathe and steam engine they used to have at the Civic Center?" asked the sergeant. "Ripped out and scrapped by a bunch of harnessed kids, I would guess."

"Moved to east of Resaca at some point in the summer, I think." said Captain Donald Kasparek, on loan from the Blue Ridge Rifles, Lumpkin County Home Guard. "They make artillery with it."

"Really? That's what it did the last time this happened."

Captain Kasparek just grunted. He was a solid commander, Ritchie believed, but not much of a conversationalist.

He had read the historical markers in the building where the gigantic lathe had been. It still amazed him to think of how a machine that had been built in 1847 could have still been in operation in the 1960's. And of course precision machinery of any age would be valuable to people who were just about down to sending their soldiers into battle with zip guns.

The lathe and the Noble Brothers Foundry that ran it, Ritchie remembered, had been a target of Abel D. Streight and his "Lightning Mule Brigade" in their abortive raid through North Alabama. It still bore the marks of Sherman's attempts to destroy it when he razed the factories of Rome. It seemed odd and fitting both that it would survive yet another invasion.

* * *

**26 September, 2011**  
**3 miles west of Elberton, Georgia**

Just beyond the barbed-wire fence was a series of rockpiles and stumps and home appliances and old cars and other natural and manmade garbage that had been cleared from the pasture and cast away over the years; irregular mounds thickly coated in blackberry vines and forest loam that might one day be a treasured find for some archeologist. Right now, with a mile of open land in three directions, they presented an excellent spot for a raised observation post.

"Anything out of the ordinary tonight?" asked Major Clifton.

"No sir, not that I can see." said Private Hezekiah Payne, sitting on a branch in a nearby tree. One might have expected him to be in the very nice watchtower they had built for him, but then that's why he had decided not to be in it.

"Good. How do you like the rifle?"

"Oh, it's cool. It's all cool, I really like having my own night-vision scope."

"I didn't ask about the scope. How do you like the rifle?"

"The rifle? Well sir, what can I say? It'll knock a Skitter flat if I see one, but only one."

Clifton shrugged. His troops hadn't been entirely enthusiastic when they found the footlocker full of antique Nepalese Snider-Enfields outside Conyers, but he managed to mostly-convince them that the old things would work well for snipers, sentries, and others who would hopefully only need one shot. They were still reasonably accurate, dependable, and powerful, and ammunition for them could be produced in a pinch from 28- and 24-gauge shotgun shells.

The 37th Company had been moving steadily west after realizing that there was nothing for them in Athens except for more of what they had left in Atlanta. There was promise of refuge on the coasts, but no one dared put too much hope in that and many wondered if they would be better off swinging north into the hills. Now they were just a few miles from the site of the infamous Georgia Guidestones[2]. Most were camped out in a quarry which might have been used to build them.

For just a moment, Clifton wondered about the Guidestones and their rationalist ten commandments: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature?" Check, or at least they would soon reach that if they hadn't already.

"Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity?" What is war, if not a hastened exercise in natural selection?

"Unite humanity with a living new language?" Working on it, assuming you could call that freaky alien telepathy a language.

"Rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason?"

Elberton had seen some examples of tempered reason since the falling of the skies. Shortly after the aliens first arrived, a horde of New Age types showed up from out of state to wait on the UFO's to come and pick them up. That never happened, and when they learned that their planet was under attack, some of them didn't take it very well. The Sheriff's Department buried the bodies on site and then demolished the Guidestones for use as grave markers. Humans were still humans, and that wouldn't be changed by flowery platitudes on a bunch of rocks in a field.

"Hey, Major, hear that? Engines to the east, vehicles approaching!"

"Human?" he asked. Clifton couldn't hear a thing, but he knew that his private had better ears and eyes.

"Yup. I can see them now. A pickup and some motorcycles coming around the bend. That would be our new friends, wouldn't it?"

* * *

Several minutes later, the commander of the 37th Independent Company was greeting a white-headed older man in a brand-new army uniform. Standing in front of a small war party who's weapons and clothing showed obvious signs of heavy use and very little cleaning, he almost seemed like a time traveller, or a visitor from another world.

"I'm Robert Williams Clifton, 37th Independent Company, Georgia Militia. This is my wife, Denise Clifton, formerly of the 9th Regimental Hospital."

"The Regimental Hospital that fought like a regiment. I've heard of Arabia Mountain; we'll do everything we can to get you're young and wounded to safety, and it's going to be an honour working with you."

The two officers smiled as they shook hands.

"I'm Colonel James Porter. Formerly of the Massachusetts Militia, now of the First Continental Army."

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Also known as M1 thumb, a seemingly-common injury with older self-loading rifles. Fail to pull the bolt back fully when sticking your finger into the receiver and it can suddenly come loose and smash it. Ouch!

Garandgear dot com has a good article on what it is and how to avoid it.

2\. Information on this structure is available all over the Internet. One old book I have on haunted places mentions that strange lights were reported in the sky at their completion and other paranormal incidents are known to occur in the area, but few other sources speak of such things.


	18. Chapter 17: Between the Rivers

_The traveller who has contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome may conceive some imperfect idea of the sentiments which they must have inspired when they reared their heads in the splendour of unsullied beauty._  
-Edward Gibbon

* * *

***Diary Entry: 00:45, Wednesday, September 28, 2011***

It's a soupy night tonight, with no moon and very thick fog coming off the water. Not too hot or too cold. I would like to say that it had been a pleasant day.

We found some human bones in one of the minivans we used as a barricade last night, we took the time to bury them this morning. Normally we wouldn't bother but… well, we found them in a car seat. That's a hard thing to deal with even after all that we've seen, I think it put the whole squad in a sour mood.

We think the units holding downtown Rome will have retreated to the southeast along 2nd Avenue by mid-morning, and that's fine by us. We'll be left in charge of what looks like a fairly vulnerable salient, so we'll want to secure another position on the far side of either the Etowah or the Oostanaula, probably the latter. There's a lot more to say I guess, but I don't really have the time or energy to go into any real detail. I'm going to bed now.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 11:21, Wednesday, September 28, 2011***

A local militia group and some units from Tennessee are attacking across the river towards the Floyd Medical Center and Shorter College. More accurately, they're attacking spider-held, vaguely-hospital-and-college-shaped mounds of rubble.

That holds true for most of Rome, actually. We're in an area called the "Between the Rivers Historic District" and I don't think a single building is still intact. Even in the midst of all the human dead, I can't help but think of how much of our cultural heritage has been lost.

I actually had a chance to visit Rome before all this happened and I really wish I had done so, because it seems like it must have been a nice place before the barbarians came and sacked it.[1]

We're getting a day off. Our company is holding in the First United Methodist Church and Staff Sergeant Everett wants to give us all a thorough checkup while he can. He says he's worried about waterborne pathogens, and that is a valid concern, but I think he's also on the lookout for eyeworms.

The spiders hadn't been settled in this city for very long, little more than a month or two in fact, but it's easy to see signs of their habitation. They partially rebuilt the roof and walls of the church, perhaps because they don't like being exposed to the elements any more than we do. There's a few cleared away areas that look like they might have been meeting halls or sleeping quarters for themselves and the harnessed kids.

[We haven't seen any harnessed kids here so far, by the way. Quite a few to the south though. Our theory is that they relocated to Lindale at the start of the battle.]

No sign of food stores, equipment, or refuse of any kind though. And that is weird… even if they were animals we would expect to find SOMETHING, right? I mean, as far as we know they don't even have (or have need of) latrines. Weird.

…well, there is Myrtle Hill Cemetery, directly across the Etowah-Oostanaula-Coosa confluence. Looks like they put one of their communications antennas on the back side of it and the amount of excavated dirt we can see makes us think that they've burrowed a sort of base into the hill (straight through the bones of past Romans, locals are very mad about that). Maybe that's where all their trash goes.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 19:50, Wednesday, September 28, 2011***

Church service and war council tonight. Learned a little bit more about the history of Rome.

John D Wisdom was a local Civil War ferryman who in 1863 rode 67 miles in 11 hours from Gadsden, Alabama to warn the Rome militia of an imminent Yankee raid. Securing the bridges before Union Colonel Abel Streight could reach it, they forced his exhausted command to surrender to a much smaller pursuit force led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest. He went down in history as the Paul Revere of Georgia for this feat.

Every year they have a major celebration in his honor, where hundreds of people come to the city to ride their wagons along Highway 53 up to Shannon and then back down Broad Street and through the city. So, does that mean the spiders got their cues from the trail ride?

Anyway…

C company has had 13 killed and 26 wounded since the last time I counted. We've had 6 new arrivals since then, so it gives us 121 total and 102 combat effective. I'm frankly surprised our losses have been so light, but then I'm also afraid of how small we're getting. Not sure how long we'll be capable of staying active at this rate.

They told us to get ready for action early tomorrow morning. I don't know what's going to happen, but I think we're going to take a few boats across the river and raid Myrtle Hill. That'll be interesting, maybe taking one of their bases will help us learn more about what is still a very inscrutable enemy.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 07:20 Thursday, September 29, 2011***

…or not.

I'll say what I can in the time I have. We just got word that there's a big enemy force massing to the south of Cartersville, they're already skirmishing with our troops on the Etowah and we're being rushed back to our old trench-lines in Bartow County. Should go pretty smoothly since that was what we were going to do after securing northern Floyd County.

There were a lot of infiltrators keeping us awake last night. We think they're going to try and recapture this city soon, and they will in all likelihood succeed. That's unfortunate but I guess it's going to be someone else's problem now.

* * *

**Rome, Georgia**  
**September 31, 2011**

Colleen almost coughed her heart out as the brick wall suddenly tumbled down. Moving through the breach and into yet another darkened corridor, she could see the spectral light of a half-moon shining down through a hole where part of the street above them had collapsed. She carefully stepped over the pile of debris and prayed that the rest of it wouldn't give way just yet.

She had heard the legends of the Rome Underground before, how the city used to flood so badly that steamboats sailed down the streets, and how it led to Broad Street being raised by 15 feet in 1886, burying the ground-level floors of the historic district.[2]

While the bulk of the Georgia Militia was yet again relinquishing the city to the invaders, the Atmarga Column was burrowing beneath their feet to get behind their line of advance and make their way across the river. This wasn't as bad as crawling through abandoned and mostly-flooded gas pipelines to emerge from the basement of a very nice suburban house, but it was still pretty bad. And their mission objective was even worse.

"So remind me why we have to go over there and knock down the flyswatter-looking thing." said Kate. "Shouldn't the artillery be able to handle that?"

"Well, they've tried. But every time they knock it down, the crabs just throw it back up." said Sergeant Gardener. "They want someone to get in close and take the station itself off the air. Permanently."

That was why the six-man team was lugging a recoilless rifle with them through the stygian depths. The homemade, single-use tube came with a 50-pound thermobaric warhead that they hoped would devastate the subsurface installation.

One invigorating swim and they came ashore at the former sight of the Broad Street bridge. They set up a reasonably well-protected firing position as Kate surveyed the recent excavations near the base of Myrtle Hill, some 150 feet away.

"Open bay doors, just like we suspected." she whispered. "So, what's going to happen when we destroy this place. Every beamer in Floyd County just falls from the sky?"

"Surely they're not that badly designed." said the sergeant. "We don't know what it'll do, truth be told. We just know that this place seems important to them, so if we can't capture it we'll do the next best thing. And I don't know if we'll change the course of battle here, but we'll certainly change the geography."

Kate nodded. She wondered just how much sacrilege they would be committing when they sent their ancestors into low-earth orbit.

"Colleen, you want to do the honours?" he asked.

"Me!? But what if I miss? We've only got one of these."

"You won't miss… you better not miss. You up for it?"

"Move over!"

Both of the girls grinned. With no idea just how big the blast would be, the humans covered their ears and opened their mouths, and most of them had the good sense to avert their eyes.

Tick, tick, boom!

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. All of this Scenery Gorn has been brought to you at the request of my brother, who really hates the city of Rome for some reason. I personally still have a lot of fond memories from going to the John Wisdom Wagon Train and Trail Rides as a kid, so I didn't particularly like doing it. Oh well, maybe the rebuilt, post-war Rome won't be quite so terrifying to drive through.

2\. The wildest versions of the Underground Rome legend have it as an Underground Atlanta-style labyrinth of several city blocks forgotten by time. It's actually, as far as I know, only a few of the older buildings, but it's still a pretty cool story so I'm using a little poetic license here.


	19. Chapter 18: Crossing the Etowah

_"Out of the night that covers me,_  
_Black as the pit from pole to pole,_  
_I thank whatever gods may be_  
_For my unconquerable soul."_  
-William Ernest Henley, Invictus

* * *

***Diary Entry: 18:50, Thursday, September 29, 2011***

Our regiment got sidetracked in Kingston when a big spider raiding party punched their way across the river. We were asked to help hunt them down, and managed to head them off before they could return to their side of the river. Even helped rescue some of the kids they had captured.

We made it to Cartersville by evening. Tomorrow C Company will be reacquainting itself with the old fighting positions near where I-75 crosses the river. We would like some time to recover from the wounds we got in Rome, but we've been told to be ready for another raid or the approach of their main body at any hour.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 15:30, Friday, September 30, 2011***

Today, we're going to clear some of the driftwood piles and other trash which might be used as cover by attacking spiders. One of our newer recruits, Private Billy Williamson, dropped our company's second-best crosscut saw into the water. With a good, firm kick, Sergeant Skitter ordered him to go down and retrieve it.

Private Billy Williamson, it turns out, doesn't know how to swim.

I had to help pull him back in, then we had to all go looking for the saw. So now I'm wet and I have no clean clothes and I'm hoping I'll have a chance to wash some of my laundry tomorrow. Maybe I won't get pneumonia.

Conditions are fairly pleasant for the time being, or at least they would be if it wasn't for the war. It's still hot and humid for September, but at least it hasn't rained in almost a week. I'm hoping we'll get out of this 80's-range-weather in the next month or so but… well… it's Georgia.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 12:45, Sunday, October 2, 2011***

"Should coming days be dark and cold,  
We will not yield to sorrow,  
For hope will sing with courage bold,  
'There's glory on the morrow.'

For now we stand on Jordan's strand;  
Our friends are passing over;  
And, just before, the shining shore  
We may almost discover."

Part of a very pretty and very fitting old song sung by a circuit-riding preacher and his family. Those are becoming common these days.

Today's Sunday service was good and the special supper we had afterwards was nice and filling, even though we had to duck for cover a few times due to incoming shells.

They spent the whole night dropping fire up and down our lines. Most of it was focused to the south of us, around the former site of New Riverside Ochre Company, but we got enough of the barrage to keep us awake. There was a lot of gunfire in the pre-dawn skies north of Cartersville too, so I'm guessing the airships must have tried landing troops up there. In many ways, it really is like a repeat of the Chattahoochee.

One thing that makes this river different from the Chattahoochee is that we can't be easily flanked, and last night showed that dropping an enemy force behind us won't be a simple matter either. But it is a smaller river, and so are the forces tasked with defending it. So our posture is still one of delay, but with the glimmer of a hope that we just might delay them indefinitely.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 06:45, Tuesday, October 4, 2011***

So much for a lack of infiltrators this time. There was a big fight in the streets of Cartersville yesterday. And we had to deal with a platoon-sized force of spiders trying to sneak around our positions last night.

I've heard reports of heavy fighting to the north of Euharlee. They finally made their move on the river there, using sheer numbers to push the defenders back from the riverbanks and into the surrounding hills. Further to the west it seems like we've fully relinquished the low-lying areas around Rome… and that feels like a real kick in the gut. I'm not so sure what's going on in the east. I know they made it across the Alatoona Lakebed and pushed as far north as the Sutallee area, and I also know there's a constant back-and-forth fight going on for the residential areas north of Canton, but beyond that it's all pretty vague to me.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 14:00, Wednesday, October 5, 2011***

Well, they came at us the same old way, and we defeated them in the same old way.

They hit us in the hours before dawn this morning. Robots stayed on their bank to try and pin us down with rockets and mortars while the spiders tried to swim across and swarm us. The beamers filled the skies and duked it out with our truck mounted anti-aircraft guns. Our piper played Green Hills of Tyrol while parachute flares filled the sky and our own artillery shells danced among their lines.

Many died from the waterborne traps we had set for them. Didn't kill as many as the ones in the Chattahoochee, and to their credit they kept coming at us even after seeing the river explode. I guess blowing up a river is only impressive to a spider the first time you do it.

That's really the only commendable thing I can say about the attack. There was no initiative or élan in that assault, it was like they fully expected to die. We lost two men and must have killed at least one-hundred of theirs. Really, it makes us wonder if that was a serious assault, or just a means of test our guns. One thing it did was clear away booby traps that we won't be able to replace, so whoever comes at us next will have an easier time of it. That might have been the plan.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 03:30, Friday, October 7, 2011***

They can run, they can duck, they've got artillery… and now the robots can leap over rivers? Why yes, of course they can leap. Why shouldn't they be able to do something like that!? HAHAHA!

A force of about 50 robots stormed across the river and trampled us underfoot. It was a confused firefight and they had us in full disarray before we knew what hit us. I don't think we took many casualties, but that was only because the supporting spiders were slow to follow the armoured advance. It's a good thing that we rehearsed our evacuation plans before this happened.

Radio reports indicate that they did this all up and down the riverbanks. Other companies and regiments are reeling northwards as well, and all things considered our company may have got it relatively easy. And that's it for our delay on the Etowah I guess, maybe it was just our turn to be fatally surprised.

We're hiding out on Pine Mountain now. We're going to see if any more stragglers show up this evening and then we're heading for the town of White. There are several warehouses and factories in that area where we might be able to hole up for awhile.

After that? I'm not sure. Rhyne Park all over again I guess.**  
**


	20. Chapter 19: Ghost Town

_In the fell clutch of circumstance_  
_I have not winced nor cried aloud._  
_Under the bludgeonings of chance_  
_My head is bloody, but unbowed. _  
-William Ernest Henley, Invictus

* * *

***Diary Entry: 07:30, Friday, October 7, 2011***

We lost two of our trucks, two dogs and five very good men, so that leaves 118 members present and accounted for. We traveled nine miles before dawn and have now reached a wood pallet factory on the outskirts of the small town of White, Georgia.

Quite a few people have tried living here before us, and that has made the place close to uninhabitable. Nothing left of the wood pallets except splinters. One of the buildings shows signs of exterior fire damage, the wall of the other has buckled from what looks like where a large truck slammed into it. The main office is riddled with bullets. There's a small shed in the back that may have had a bear living in it. The roofs leak in several places and the shop floors are covered in inky water dotted by islands and continents of floating trash. There was a fresh dead opossum lying near that water... for once we did not eat it.

At least it the factory is discreet, well off of a fairly minor road and surrounded by woods and pastures. It's a fixer-upper, but it'll do for being one more place to hole up and lick our wounds. While most will spend the day doing cleanup, I've been told to take a nap and get ready to scout the town this afternoon. Sounds like a good idea to me, since it keeps me from having to clean out the stinkwater.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 19:10, Friday, October 7, 2011***

Found some Spider and motorcycle tracks near Wolfpen Branch and the Baptist Church, but they were several days old and too faint to learn anything from. If anyone else is in the area, they're trying their hardest not to be seen.

The police station and city hall in White have burned to the ground. The area once had a reputation as the speed-trap capitol of Georgia, and someone must have been looking for payback.[1] There's some barricades along Highway 411that look like they've seen some heavy fighting in the past, and most of the roadfront buildings look like they were razed by alien rocketfire.

Beyond all that, it seems like White is a charming and reasonably-intact little town. There's quite a few other factories in the area, a lot of big chicken and cattle farms, and one of the biggest classic car junkyards in the world. The chickens and cows are all gone, and the cars must have been carted off to make more robots. Most of the buildings are either pigsties like our own new home or else picked so clean that you won't even find mice in them. Humans, aliens, and even most of the animals have moved on it seems, and I guess that's a good thing for us.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 14:30, Sunday, October 9, 2011***

Did I really think I would get out of sanitation duty? Of course not.

We're building up a big pile of trash in one of the loading docks because we can't burn it, but we don't want it getting too big because that would also look suspicious. I guess we'll eventually have to bury it, and at least the weather is fairly nice for that kind of work.

The Bond siblings got pulled from my squad to do another patrol yesterday. They glimpsed a small group of humans hiding out in some houses, but they ran away when our people tried to make contact. All they could say about them is that they didn't appear to be armed and looked sort of dirty, though they didn't get a very good look... I wonder why they would want to be so unapproachable. If we do indeed have neighbors, and if we don't know who or what their intentions are, it'll do us well to keep an active patrol schedule going so that no one surprises us.

At least they also bagged a few geese. A day of prayer and rest, and we'll eat well for Sunday supper.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 18:45, Monday, October 10, 2011***

Raining right now, but I don't think it'll last for long.

There is a very large Spider force massing near Interstate 75 and Aubrey Lake to our south, and another one moving up Stamp Creek Road to our southeast. Lots of beamers in the air too, day and night. They seem to be working to secure the outskirts of Cartersville, looking to collect any stragglers left in the area. Stragglers like us.

We don't have the numbers or firepower to fight them head-on (or at all, really), but Sergeant Skitter and some of his people have an idea that might help in this regard: Dragon's Breath. Take a shotgun shell loaded magnesium pellets instead of lead and you get a blinding gout of fire and sparks that can go out to more than 50 feet. Magnesium burns at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, so it could theoretically incinerate anything it touches. Bye-bye buckshot, hello flamethrower.

I've played with dragon's breath in the past, and I see a few big problems with the idea. Magnesium may burn hot, but it doesn't burn for very long (not even a second, usually) and it doesn't "stick" like most effective flame weapons do. It's also a lot harder to find and weaponize than lead or steel. And our enemies have proven themselves to be relatively fire-tolerant in any event. In the past you were probably more likely to see the rounds sold at fireworks stands than gun stores because that's basically all they are. I am a little skeptical of their usefulness in combat.

Skitter agrees. His idea is to use the stuff primarily to disorient and frighten the enemy, sort of like a slightly more dangerous flashbang. Could be useful for distractions, escapes and ambushes I guess, or for short-term illumination. Beyond that? Well, to be absolutely honest I'm still not sure if you would be worse off with a flashbang.

I almost wonder if they just wanted an excuse to screw around with their boomsticks, and have no intention to ever really use them against Spiders.[2] But then it was Skitter who first suggested using candle wax and melted crayons to hold militarily-useless birdshot shells together and thus turn them into field-expedient slugs, so maybe he's on to something.[3] We'll see.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 19:35, Wednesday, October 12, 2011***

One of our patrols rode to the far side of White and almost had their horses stolen. A firefight broke out with the rustlers, one of ours was wounded and at least one of theirs was killed... he couldn't have been more than 12 years old...

...no idea if they were working for the aliens or just freelance marauders. They seem to have cleared out when the shooting started, though we're going to stay on high alert in case they come after one of our other patrols or find their way to the factory. Guess we have to remember to be on guard for predators of the six, four and two-legged variety.

We had a war council tonight and the plans haven't changed. This place is okay for now, but we can't stay permanently. The area above the Coosawattee River still seems like the safest bet, but getting there means we'll have to sneak around some pretty huge enemy formations. Shooting due north up Highway 411 would be ideal, but if need be we could veer northeast towards Ludville or northwest towards Sonoraville.

And then what? We could go across the river and so deep into the Cohutta Wilderness that they never find us, but then we aren't fighting anymore. Some people really hate that idea, and they think that what we should be doing is raiding on the fringes of Spider expansion, harassing and living off of them as much as possible.

I don't think that's an option. I think the summers in Georgia last so long that people forget just how bad the winters can be. Nighttime temperatures will probably drop below freezing by the end of this month, the sheltering leaves will fall from the trees in November, and it'll be snowing by December. It's been pointed out that the mountains are even colder than the valleys, but at least up there we won't have to fight the weather and the aliens both. We need to find ourselves a Valley Forge where we can build up our food supply, get some firewood chopped, prepare ourselves for winter and continued resistance in the spring.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 19:05, Thursday, October 13, 2011***

Rained a little bit last night, and I think it's going to rain again tonight.

We had a very interesting radio conversation today. A group from the east had a message for any militia units in this area, and requests a face-to-face meeting within the next day or two. They gave us a location to send an envoy, about eight miles west-by-northwest in the nearby hills. They won't tell us what exactly they want and we won't tell them where exactly we are, but I guess we all have to be little circumspect in a world where 12-year-olds try to mug and murder you. Our company XO and part of my squad will travel there tomorrow.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 05:58, Friday, October 14, 2011***

Oh God, no...

...Private Kelly Bond was badly wounded in a confrontation with Spiders. Doctor Everett can't say what the odds are but, well, she broke her back and got impaled on a tree branch.

She's only 14 years old. She shouldn't be fighting for her life like this, she shouldn't be fighting at all. I'm her sergeant and I didn't even know she was on patrol duty last night, and now I'm going to have to leave her again.

We set out at first light. Whatever we find out there, it had better be worth it.

* * *

1\. The Chief of Police and the only full-time deputy in this small town were recently (January, 2016) subject to FBI prosecution for their various fine-mongering schemes, and there's talk of more arrests. The local government has a legendary reputation for corruption and people have been predicting for years that those behind it would end up in jail or lynched one day.

2\. Dragon's Breath is one of many exotic novelty rounds that can be found for shotguns. Most of them are of... dubious combat use and it's probably for the best that it only turned up once in the series.

3\. This was apparently a pretty common Great Depression-era trick for hunters who couldn't afford real slugs or buckshot. Good against skitters, probably not effective for mechs.


	21. Chapter 20: Nuisance Animals

_Beyond this place of wrath and tears_  
_Looms but the Horror of the shade, _  
_And yet the menace of the years _  
_Finds and shall find me unafraid._  
-William Ernest Henley, Invictus

* * *

**12 October, 2011**  
**Near Waleska, Georgia**

At the sound of gunfire from the perimeter, Dwayne Allen put his pistol to the head of the militia leader and blew his brains out. He waited a moment before shooting his two assistants—he loved giving them just a moment to figure out what was going on, the look of shock and terror on their faces— before grabbing a rifle and joining in the fight.

It was almost becoming routine at this point. He would find an excuse to get inside and decapitate the leadership while his fellow Quislings swarmed the outer defenses. They preferred to merely mark the location of enemy formations and let the mechs and beamers do the hard part, but they could handle smaller detachments on their own. The group they were currently attacking had numbered 15; they fought well but they were surprised, leaderless and outnumbered 4 to 1. The battle was over quickly.

"Area secure." announced Jack Toland, his second-in-command "Four of ours dead and one more expectant." Jack's report was cut off by the report of a pistol shot. He cringed at the sound and took a few seconds to regain his composure. "Took a lot of weapons and ammunition, but no prisoners. Did you do any better?"

"No. That lieutenant tried to draw on me, I had to shoot him." he lied. In his bloodlust, Dwayne had forgotten all about the intelligence-gathering aspect of the mission.

"Not a bad operation, but not a good one either. I don't know if this was worth five lives; we don't exactly have people lining up to join us."

"Nope. Maybe we can find out where these guys came from, see if there's any more like them in the area. Let's get out of here."

* * *

*sniff* *sniff* *chomp*

*sniff* *sniff* *chomp*

The bear chewed happily at the dead creature that lay before him. He didn't really like the taste—much too reminiscent of human, but free food was free food and he wasn't going to pass on a relatively fresh kill, not with the times as rough as they were. The humans had stopped filling their garbage cans and the pickings on their farms had become lean indeed. He didn't know why so many of them were now to be found lying dead in the woods like this thing, but it wasn't something he was going to put a lot of though into.

A rustling in the nearby bushes told him that something was approaching, more of the six-legged things coming to take away his food! An older or wiser bear might have run, but he tip-toed—in what many would call a very human-like manner— into a good ambush spot and prepared to fight for the meal that he had rightfully stolen.[1]

* * *

"ROAR!"

The skitter scrambled out of the way as the... monster... leapt at him. It was the strangest thing he ever saw; standing like a human at one moment and then assuming the posture of a typical quadruped the next.

He tried to claw at its nose and it badly mauled his arm. It spit him to the ground next to what he guessed was a previous victim, he grabbed a dismembered leg and smashed it over its head as it came in for the kill. He tried to jab the talon into its throat but the fur and fat were too thick to do any real damage. It swiped him away with clawed arms that shattered his carapace in a sickening crack, slinging him against the ground and knocking him unconscious.

Several shots rang out and the bear fell to the ground beside the skitter, a pool of red blood mixing with his purple. Two skitters swarmed the scene of battle and examined both bodies in astonishment. The mech immediately switched to the casualty evacuation routine, scooping up the wounded skitter and retreating to the nearest friendly installation.

"Will he live?" asked one of them.

"I don't know. I've never seen injuries like that..."

The senior skitter cautiously prodded the dead animal. It vaguely reminded him of the dogs that he had seen humans use, and he hoped to all creation that it wasn't some new servant of theirs.

"Wh... what is this?"

"Ursus americanus." said the other. "Bear, sir: a large omnivore that mostly lives on berries, fish, or small rodents. This particular variant seldom attacks intelligent animals like us or the humans, but they are clearly capable of doing so."

"Clearly... and what about that one?" he asked, gesturing to the dead skitter who had been the cause of all the trouble.

"He's an example of why we don't let local wildlife develop a taste for us. It will be difficult to identify him with the face chewed off. I don't he's one of ours. He could be a servant of a neighboring overlord who got lost and wandered into our domain. He could be a renegade: one of those crazy ones who overpowered their harnesses and are now living in the mountains, murdering humans and skitters alike."

"The renegades don't really exist." said the senior sarcastically. "We'll take him back with us for further investigation. We'll take the bear too; perhaps humans eat them, when not being eaten by them."

* * *

**13 October, 2011**  
**Heritage Park**  
**Canton, Georgia**

"That's what we're thinking, too. At least two groups will be meeting in the hills tonight. I would like to send out patrols to intercept them."

"Unsure. They didn't reveal much information over the radio, they have to know we're listening. Still, if we manage to find where even one of them is hiding then it would be a great breakthrough for us, especially in light of our recent setbacks."

That struck a nerve. As a species that thought they could control causality itself, the Overlords did not like being reminded that they were in any way capable of failure.

Dwayne hated talking to the Big Boss, even though he actually hated him a lot less than a lot of humans he had worked for. Dwayne was very unusual in being an unharnessed human who could communicate telepathically with Overlords, probably owing to a mix of the right genes and the right drugs. It caused moderate physical pain even for him, and even most gifted humans preferred to learn sign language, but Dwayne preferred a mild headache to anything that resembled learning.

Having gotten his lecture on the invincibility of the Espheni and the inevitability of their victory, and also an OK on his plan for recognizance-in-force, Dwayne got in his jeep and drove back to the city park, off to deal with a bunch of people that he hated. A bonfire was blazing in the open in spite of his orders to conserve wood. His men were standing around openly or smoking in the shadows in spite of warnings that hostile snipers were still lurking in the night. Half of them were drunk or high in spite of his word that they should to move out tomorrow. Jack Toland approached as he stepped out of the vehicle.

"Sir, I tried... they wouldn't listen to me!"

Dwayne ignored him. He had pretty much expected this to happen; Toland was too much of a yuppie dweeb to command respect from anyone except other yuppie dweebs. He had good managerial and housekeeping skills—would have made for a very fun cellmate—but he wasn't the best choice for an executive officer, at least not for these kind of people.

These kind of people were a mixed bag. A lot of them were like Toland, disgraced ex-resistance fighters who had nowhere else to go. Others dreamed of gaining power and influence in the service of their new alien overlords. Some fought with the promise that the Espheni would spare captured loved ones. A few weirdos actually believed that the aliens made for more suitable rulers of the earth than humanity. They spanned the spectrum of pre-war class and backgrounds, but there was a definite lean towards the kind of people you would have found in county lockup, the free clinic, the diploma-mill liberal arts college or the local DMV office.[2]

Dwayne liked to think that he was smarter than the average dalit. He knew they weren't going to let him live like a king, they weren't going to set up reservations for the people he cared he cared about (assuming there were any). He was just here for the pay-check; he had spent his whole life following his stomach and gonads to the side that paid the best, and he didn't mind digging his own grave if it meant keeping him supplied in his choice of women and shrooms for the duration.

"Oh well... let them have their fun tonight. Hell, most of them probably fight better with hangovers. See me in the morning, we're moving out tomorrow."

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. What you have here is a bear that has become used to civilization and has lost its fear of humans, or skitters. At best he'll make a serious nuisance of himself (Yogi Bear is not funny when it's YOUR picnic basket he steals), at worst he comes into your yard, decides he doesn't want trash or poodles today and eats your children instead.

Cherokee County had far more bears in the past than it does now, but I've had friends there who've lost pets and livestock to them in recent years. They mostly confine themselves to remote and mountainous areas, but it wouldn't surprise me if a post-automobile and largely post-human era saw them spreading into the deserted suburbs. And here you thought coyotes and dogs would be your biggest wildlife danger.

Actually, what worries me more than bears and almost as much as dogs is feral pigs. They're omnivores, they're bigger than dogs and about as smart, they travel in packs, they've been known to kill humans and the ones that escaped from farms may already associate humans with food.

Incidentally, I know quite a few people, including my mom and two grandparents, who claim to have seen mountain lions in North Georgia...

2\. I've been wanting to do a chapter devoted to human Quislings for quite a while, but it was very hard for me to imagine the kind of people who could be worthless enough to side with aliens, functional enough to actually be of use to them, and resilient enough to survive those early months where the aliens don't seem like they were in business of accepting turncoats.

I prefer Stephen McTowlie's take on Espheni-human relations, where they immediately get in touch with prospective traitors to set up vassal states under their control, but in the TV series it seemed like something they only did out of desperation.


	22. Chapter 21: From the Valley

_It matters not how strait the gate,_  
_How charged with punishments the scroll,_  
_I am the master of my fate,_  
_I am the captain of my soul._  
-William Ernest Henley, Invictus

* * *

**14 October, 2011**  
**Near Pine Log, Georgia**

Discretely cutting off from the cul-de-sac of what had been a very nice residential subdivision, the long-disused logging trail led up into the hills and would carry the emissaries to their intended rendezvous point.

The weather was good. Late-morning sunshine fell through the partial cloud cover to illuminate the pine-covered hills in patches of golden light. A gentle breeze swept through the trees, and a little creek bubbled along the side of the path. It was, Lieutenant David Hall had to admit, a very nice day.

"Take a break, team. Look around and see if there's anything edible in these woods. Sergeant Tag, come with me."

Sarah and her company's XO moved just out of earshot while the others started poking around the trees and the creek. The acorns were falling by now and there were also hickory and walnut trees in the area. The kudzu hadn't died yet and there was still a good bit in a nearby clearing. There were signs of bear, deer, turkey, and other game in the general area. There were salamanders, crawdads, fish and turtles in the creek and many edible greens growing along the banks. Foraging was not their primary objective, but the taskforce would be remiss in their duties if they didn't return with more food than they had taken.

"Sarah, I'm worried about a couple of our soldiers. Would you like to hold up here with the feverish ones while I press on to the objective?"

"No..." she said, somewhat absently. "I don't want to split our force when we don't know for sure what's in store for us. My men were getting restless in that factory; this hike will do them a lot of good."

Lieutenant Hall nodded. Close quarters and a cold, drafty environment; it was amazing how few of them were falling sick.

"And what about you?"

"Huh? What about me?"

"You still feel guilty about Private Bond."

Sarah didn't respond; she didn't really need to.

"Look, this is a world where kids have to grow up too fast. There's going to be consequences and there's going to be casualties. And that sucks, but all we can do is prepare them for what's in front of them. And I want you to quit worrying about things you couldn't prevent and focus on what's ahead of you, and right now that means finding us something good to eat."

Sarah nodded. She then walked back to edge the creek and began deftly gathering a small shrub with purple leaves and long, horizontal roots.

"Yellowroot, sir. Very useful medicinal plant; it won't fill your stomach but it will help fight off pneumonia. We can make some tea out of it when we get to the meeting place."[1]

* * *

***Diary Entry: 17:00, Friday, October 14, 2011***

Nothing to report on my private, except that she's still in our prayers.

We're waiting on a logging trail near the top of Bear Mountain, one of the southernmost peaks of the Appalachian Mountains. We wouldn't starve if we were to stay up in an area like this. Most of the skitters and refugees didn't get this high into the ridges, so there's still plenty of undisturbed plant and wildlife for us. Salacoa Valley to our north is said to have a very well-organized and well-defended community, but they are also said to be wary of outsiders.

There's a number of TV and radio towers up here and at least one old firetower, but so far we haven't seen any sight of our friends. We may have to camp up here for the night, and that'll be a pain because Lieutenant Hall doesn't feel secure enough to start fires on this mountaintop and the wind through these pines is going to be ver

[diary stops mid-sentence, cut off by the noise of an approaching, human engine.]

* * *

**14 October, 2011**  
**Bear Mountain, Georgia**

The antique Beechcraft Model 18 only made one pass before coming in to land in what the ground party now realized was a very runway-like stretch of logging trail. Two men wearing a new-looking Army Combat Uniforms and shouldering military-issue M4A1 Carbines stepped out of the airplane and began to cautiously approach. The older one, an officer of some kind, was smiling as he came.

"Well hello there, who do we have here?" he asked.

"C Company, 12th Regiment... First Lieutenant David Hall. And who, may I ask, are you?" said the executive officer, just a little suspiciously.

"I am General Cole Bressler, 1st Continental Army. This is my navigator, and my son, Matt Bressler. Would have been here a lot earlier but we had a little trouble getting around their patrols. Thank God this airstrip is still serviceable, it's the most secluded spot I know of in this area."

"Airstrip?" he asked.

"You're standing on one of several concealed airstrips found throughout the hills of North Georgia. I used to make a lot of nighttime deliveries here after getting back from Vietnam, but of course that was a very long time ago..."

Sarah Tagliabue listened intently to the flyer's story; she could tell that he was a unique individual. Concealed airports being visited at night by post-Vietnam pilots? Did he ever fly with Air America, by any chance? Sergeant Skitter had taught her a little about this region's wild history; the General sounded like had once shared the skies with the likes of Barry Seal and Andrew Thorton II.[2]

"That's a lot of officer to be sending out for errands." said Hall.

"It is, but it's just enough pilot to get the job done. We fly low and slow, travel at night or in bad weather when we can... it's dangerous enough when we don't run into the enemy, I think the only reason we can fly at all is because they don't really expect anyone to be stupid enough to try. I'm one of four pilots who left Charleston, South Carolina, in search of survivors. We each took a compass point[3] and we've been hop-scotching cross-country ever since. We'll keep doing it till our tanks are half-empty or until we're dead."

"Well, it's a neat trick. And now that you're here, can you tell us what this Charleston stuff is all about?"

"It's the capital of a restored United States of America, elected by almost 400,000 citizens under the leadership of Majority Leader Arthur Manchester.[4] We've been assimilating the disparate militias that popped up post-invasion, bringing together remnants of the military, providing them with heavy weapons and working to re-establish a unified central command. We control a big stretch of the coast and now we're trying to spread inland. As far as we can tell, we have the biggest organization on either side of the Atlantic."

"You mean you've made contact with other parts of the world?"

"Via shortwave... in Europe and South America. We've also heard from groups in the Great Lakes, Appalachia, the Midwest, Texas... people are working together again "

Lieutenant Hall offered their limited hospitality to the pilots and they spent the next hour discussing the Continental Congress and what plans it had for the Georgia Militia. His suggestion was that they head due east towards South Carolina, or even turn around and go south to reach Interstate 20.

Hall momentarily wondered if the general was stupid or simply too used to looking at things from the sky. He calmly pointed out that the path of least resistance lay to the north and that was probably where they would continue going, though he would advise the captain to consider veering towards the northwest and maybe sending scouts to see if what he said about Charleston was true. Bressler was disappointed by this, but he did hope that they would keep in touch and join them on the coasts once they felt more secure.

He spent a few minutes answering questions from the rest of the detachment before leaving. They wouldn't be allowed to fly their plane back to the headquarters and they didn't want to part with it long enough to go there on foot. As the Lieutenant Hall prepared to head back to camp, he asked that Bressler wait before taking off, just in case any enemy forces were alerted by the sound of the plane.

* * *

**14 October, 2011**  
**Lake Arrowhead**  
**Near Waleska Georgia**

It had been another awful day for Dwayne and his little Quisling unit. Their wanderings had turned up nothing and the Espheni would be pissed because of it, even though they clearly hadn't given him enough support to make it an operation worth doing. Worse, some of his men had apparently gotten hold of bad pills again and were starting to hallucinate.

"I'm telling you, I heard an airplane earlier! A human airplane!"

"You did not hear an airplane, Corey." said Dwayne Allen "There are no airplanes left, and no one would be stupid enough to..."

There was a strange noise echoing across the lakeside lot where the men were camped. It was unmistakably the sound of roaring engines at full throttle. A brilliant red sun was starting to set beneath the mountain ridge to the west, and against its light he could just barely glimpse a little black speck rising from the pines.

"Sir," said Jack Toland, "that would be a..."

"SHUT UP, JACK! Get moving boys, that thing's taking off from the top of the mountain and we can get up there before it gets dark. Probably had a welcome party... maybe we can pick up their trail!"

* * *

***Diary Entry: 19:30, Friday, October 14, 2011***

That "group from the east" is from almost 300 miles to the east. They came in on an airplane, all the way from Charleston, South Carolina.

We've heard all kinds of weird rumors about a huge survivor sanctuary in the Carolinas wuth their ambitious project to restore civilization to the entire United States, and of course we already know about all the fascinating equipment coming out of their "Palmetto Arms Arsenal." Apparently, those rumors and more are completely true. People there are getting married and having kids again, there's electricity and running water, no one's starving or dying of easily treatable conditions. The ambassadors made it sound like a land of milk and honey, or maybe that's what we wanted to hear, and they did pretty good at selling the idea that we should come join the party.

I don't know if I buy it. They claim to control most of South Carolina below the Fall Line, and I just can't see how an organization that size could keep from stomped flat by the aliens, even if they did have an air force and their own munitions plants. We still have no proof that anything they said is true, and I don't think they were as surprised as they acted when the Lieutenant said that we would probably continue heading into the highlands.

Still, if even a word of it is true, we would do well to find a way of collaborating with them.

* * *

Footnotes:  
1\. Yellowroot in this case refers to Xanthorhiza Simplicissima, fairly common in the hills of North Georgia. It contains a very powerful natural antibiotic called berberine which, like many medicines, seems to be at least a little bit toxic. My grandparents believed that drinking too much yellowroot tea at one time would kill you, but I've found little published evidence to support this and I suspect they were confusing yellowroot with its cousin goldenseal.

2\. I'm taking a few liberties here, as the legendary secret smugglers' runways were actually said to be further north, in Gilmer or Dawson County.

If you remember the fourth season of Justified, Drew Thompson/Shelby Parlow was based off of Andrew Thorton II, who really did parachute to his death near Ellijay, Georgia about 30 miles from where I grew up. Or perhaps he faked his death to get away from his enemies and is hiding out in the mountains to this day, as local legends claim. The Bluegrass Conspiracy documents his life quite well.

Barry Seal ran a similar operation in the Ozarks before he was assassinated by the Medellin Cartel (or by the CIA). A movie about his life, Mena, is current being filmed at the Moto Mountain ATV Park in Jerusalem, Georgia, about 5 miles from where I grew up. In his time, Barry Seal was known for his very close associations with various federal, state and local officials, including former Arkansas Governor Mr. Hillary Rodham.

3\. I wonder where the guy who went east ends up. There's Bermuda I suppose, but is that so important that they couldn't just send a boat? Avery's plan of going to Europe via Greenland make me think that none of their planes are able to make a full transatlantic flight (or perhaps they do and Charleston wants two of them in Europe?).

I'm guessing most of these vintage planes have been fitted with extended fuel tanks to increase the range of their flights. I don't even want to guess on how Charleston managed to keep a fleet of planes fueled or maintained.

4\. Population boosted to go along with the greater geographic area, and because the canonical 3,000 is too few even for Charleston proper. Real-life population of that city in 2010 was 120,000—so Falling Skies gives us a 2.5% survival rate, which makes sense once you realize the true nature of the Arthur Manchester's settlement but should have seemed shocking had anyone in the 2nd Mass tried to run the numbers.

Bressler is exaggerating, by the way. The population will actually be closer to 350,000 by the end of autumn, so 8% of pre-war South Carolina's population.


	23. Chapter 22: To the Mountains

"Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up."  
-Charles Krauthammer

* * *

***Diary Entry: 06:40, Monday, October 17, 2011***

Private Kelly Bond was rolled out in her new wheelchair to greet us yesterday. Doctor Everett says she'll most certainly never walk again, and ultimately may not survive at all. There's some hope that she might recover the use of her arms and fingers, but he can't say anything for sure unless he gets access to better medical equipment... of the kind that we may or may not find in Charleston...

Overall, Kelly seems to be in good spirits. Says that once she's strong enough to use a gun again she'll strap herself to the back of a technical and start riding into battle. No more scouting, no more marching, all she needs is a good vantage point, an easily-controlled weapons platform and a functional trigger finger. Bloody, but unbowed.

The order to break camp came as soon as the debriefing and morning church service was over. I was given time to sleep (and cry) and we'll be moving out at dawn. We'll make Fairmount before dusk if we're lucky, but beyond that I'm not sure where we'll be going. Hard to say what the Captain thinks about all this Charleston stuff. He's acting as skeptical as anyone, but I think the idea of skipping a winter hibernation and getting right back into the war appeals to him.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 18:34, Monday, October 17, 2011***

"Pathway to the Smokies"

That's what one of the signs we passed calls this highway, and that sounds about right. It seems to follow the base of the hills in this area, a low-lying and somewhat marshy patchwork of fields and forest to the west and some very imposing terrain all along the eastern front. If we're not into the hill country yet, we very soon will be.

There is a good bit of enemy activity in the skies but no sign of hostiles on the ground. We tried to skirt the edges of Fairmont itself and we'll be spending the night in a small holler in the woods to the northeast of the town.

Fairmont was a little bit bigger than White, but still no more than a thousand residents pre-war. We'll be sending some scouts to recce the place I'm sure, but I'm told that there's even less to see here than there was in White: a farm supply store, some churches, some shuttered textile mills, a bombed out VFW post and that's about it.

Something else that makes it different is that it doesn't seem to be quite as abandoned. Most of the locals are probably hiding in the hills and woods, but we did see a few sentries and some patrols, and we could tell that other humans are operating in the area. Didn't manage to speak to any of them, but

[diary stops mid-sentence]

We have visitors. Some of the locals must have noticed our camp and Captain Hall is speaking with them right now. They seem friendly, but understandably wary of strangers. They say that we're not the first paramilitary column to move through the area and that not all of the units are friendly. Maybe they'll have some advice on where we go from here.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 07:20, Tuesday, October 18, 2011***

Fairly chilly this morning, and it looks like it's going to rain.

The visitors from last night came back. We traded a few odd-ammo rifles for some that fired 30-30. Not a good spider-killing round but at least it's plentiful and works well with black-powder. We traded a pack burro that was also plow-broken for one that wasn't. Got some crates full of freshly-picked apples out of that deal. I can't remember the last time I ate a fresh apple.

Looks like we're not going to dig in at the Coosawattee River anymore, as there's no longer any real line of resistance there. We're going west, following Highway 53 to Ludville, Hinton and then (probably) going north again to Ellijay. Of course that was one of several options we've been considering since retreating from the Etowah, but Captain Hall finalized the decision after hearing that the war in Georgia has already gone dormant.

...nonetheless, he does want to get a first-hand account of what conditions are like to the north of here. He's sending a couple of squads to scout along highway 411 as far as Oakman, and it looks like mine drew the short straw again. We go tomorrow, and on Thursday or Friday we'll rendezvous with the company in Hinton.

* * *

**17 October, 2011**  
**White, Georgia**

The Espheni troopship lifted from the factory parking lot and floated into the afternoon sky. Dwayne cursed the powerful antigrav wash as it passed over him, tingling his bones and causing him to shudder almost to the point of collapse. The ship would join the others in scanning the immediate area for rebel units.

It wouldn't find anything of course. Their sensors were woefully ineffective—to the point that many Overlords were trying to reverse-engineer infrared cameras and other human technology—and any human still alive at this point had learned to avoid detection from the air. That was going to be his job.

"Learn a lot by digging through people's garbage, don't you?" asked one of his better trackers, using his shovel to unearth the bones of what looked an opossum before getting another scoop.

Whoever had been here before had buried their trash because they probably didn't want to risk burning it. They had left enough clutter around the place to make it look abandoned, but the inside of the buildings showed evidence of some decent housekeeping. They had left the place in pretty good shape and Dwayne was going to make a mental note of it, just in case he ever needed a safehouse in the area.

"What are we finding?" he asked.

"There were at least a hundred of them here. Stayed for a couple of weeks, couldn't have pulled out more than a couple of days ago. Heading north."

"Carters Lake?" suggested Jack Toland, fresh in from a patrol of the area. Dwayne nodded.

"That's where I would be going; we'll need to move fast if we want to catch them before they disappear into the wilderness.."

"Sir... if they get much further north then they'll be out of our overlord's territory. That belongs to someone who might not recognize us, and the area's also crawling with rebel militias who will. And besides that, we've never taken on anything this big or well-organized before. We're asking for trouble, here!"

"Oh don't worry about it, we'll have plenty of backup from the augments, and if we're out of our element than at least they probably are too. And besides, the reason our boss likes us so much is that we're able to do things like this, um, real quiet-like."

Dwayne had his own concerns. He was especially upset over the fact that 45 men were expected to operate with one truck and a dozen motorcycles. Meaning that he either overloaded his vehicles, moved with a depleted force or his whole gang moved at the speed of a hiker with a bum knee. He didn't dare complain about it though; they had been given horses after his last complaint over inadequate transport—and if you think humans have trouble working around antigravity...

...still, something about Jack's gun-shyness only made him more eager for a fight. Whatever trouble they ran into, Dwayne was not going to let this group get away.

* * *

**18 October, 2011**  
**Hills above Ranger, Georgia**

Kate stirred at the scrambled egg and raised the pan slightly from the small fire in the middle of the wigwam-like structure. She had gotten pretty good at this while she waited for her shrapnel wounds to heal, and her new companions had needed a good cook almost as much as they needed a good forager.

"So y'all never thought of foraging for eggs before?" asked Colleen.

"Thought of it, sure." said Dominic, the de-facto leader of the little band. "Actually gone out and done it? Well, none of the survival manuals we have talk about it, so we didn't think it was worth doing."[1]

"You were already eating roe from the fish you caught—except for gar I hope. You can find turtle eggs on sandy creek banks and starling eggs in old buildings, it's just a matter of knowing where to look."

Dominic's group had done pretty good, all things considered. Fourteen members between the ages of six and eighteen who had somehow survived on their own in the remote high country of East Gordon and West Pickens County. They had looted enough store-bought food to tide them over for the first few months, and since then had existed as a semi-nomadic band, feeding themselves mostly through hunting and fishing even though few of them had had any real survival experience. The Daughters of Thunder suspected that their survival was a testament to Napoleon Bonaparte's belief that sometimes it was better to be lucky than skilled.

"Going to be a lot harder to find eggs in winter, same as everything else." noted Kate. "You should consider hiring on to one of the local farms before the Fall Harvest is over. That or coming with us when Colleen gets better, help us find our unit."

"No thank you." said Andy, the group's fourteen-year-old second-in-command, "Adults just get you killed, and I think we're safer here than we would be if we tried to join the army."

"Until you starve," said Colleen "Or until the aliens find you. You can't just keep hiding forever, there ain't a mountain high enough or a hole deep enough for that."

"We've done alright so far." he boasted. "And why do you think we would starve? I know it'll be harder when it gets cold, but it ain't like the deer and rabbit are just going to disappear. We should do fine if we can keep trapping them."

"There ain't enough fat in those kinds of animals. Try living off lean meats alone and you'll die of rabbit starvation. You can live without meat or even carbohydrates if you find another source of fats and proteins, and you can live for quite awhile without protein. But if you eat protein without fat or carbohydrates then you'll die almost as fast as if you weren't eating anything."

"Yeah, your fattier animals like bear and possum and beaver are either hibernating or they like to stay in the lower areas." said Kate. "You'll need a staple like acorns or berries to get through the winter, and you should have started gathering those months ago. You don't have enough."

"We'll think of something." said Dominic, growing increasingly annoyed with the conversation.

"Try to take up thieving again, maybe? Great idea that was." said Colleen pointedly. Dominic glared at her, and then stormed out of the shelter. A concerned Andy followed behind him, leaving the two girls alone.

"Colleen, you shouldn't have said that." said Kate.

"It's true." she replied.

"He knows that. I think he figured it out when his brother died. Let's try not to upset these kids, though. We need them to like us, at least until you can travel again."

* * *

**18 October, 2011**  
**One mile south of Ranger, Georgia**

All the way up to Carter's Lake, Highway 411 and the L&amp;N railroad followed the same general path through the long and narrow valley. It had been a stagecoach route for most of the 19th century, and before that a cattle trail for the first white pioneers and a trading path for the Cherokee Indians. The fields of corn and soy looked abandoned, though it was possible that those further from the main thoroughfares were still under cultivation of some kind.

The forests covering the hills in this area were clearly second-growth; with cycles of agricultural booms and busts leaving failed operations to return to the wilderness. One could walk through a seemingly-virgin tangle of briars and branches and suddenly come across a stone wall or the foundations of a long-gone barn. C Company's scouts found the remnants of an ancient junkyard hiding in one big patch of pines, and that was where they decided to have their afternoon break.

Taking shelter in an old school bus, it was Sergeant Tagliabue's turn to cook. She wasn't good but she was pretty sure no one would die from her meals. They had killed a couple of squirrels and rabbits and, even though they had used most of the muscle mass for breakfast, the carcasses still had plenty left to offer.

Most of the organs went into the stewpot, along with some rosehips, other greens, and a bit of feral corn they had found. The pulverized bones were added as a calcium-rich filler, and the brains were split among the party, who roasted them on sticks like little marshmellows. The taste was not unlike liver, and the texture was oddly similar to candy.

"It was bad enough learning to like liver, and now this? At least we're still keeping the intestines for bait." said Lieutenant Ferreira.

"Don't knock it; chittlin's are pretty good." said Simone Bond.[2]

"I can't judge:" said Sarah, "moose-head was once as much of a delicacy in Quebec as squirrel brain was in Appalachia. May well cause your own brain to rot, but I'd rather die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in twenty years than die of rabbit starvation now."

The French Acadian and the Black Southerner both chuckled, Lieutenant Ferreira looked like he was going to puke.

"So, what's going on with the lights on in town and the steam coming from that factory?" he asked, desperately hoping to change the subject.

"They used to make water treatment chemicals there I think, bleach and stuff." said one of the other soldiers "Fair bet it was used to make bombs after the sky fell, but why would the spiders care? Why so much security in a place as small as Ranger? Going into business for themselves?"

"Maybe" said Ferreira "Too heavily defended to do anything about now. We'll scout the general area and then go in for a closer look tonight. Whatever's going on, it's important enough to them that we might want to know more about it."

* * *

***Diary Entry: 13:35, Tuesday, October 18, 2011***

Got hot again all of the sudden. The temperature is around 80, and it's also uncomfortably muggy from the morning rains. We're camping out on some high ground near Marlowe Creek, south of Ranger, this afternoon.

We've been probing around in the area and we can already tell that something... odd is going on in that town. Once a little map-dot of 85 people, it's now a pretty big base for enemy forces. They've restored electricity to the area, and it seems that they have some kind of major operation in a factory on a spur off the railroad. Their ships come in every few hours on what I would guess are supply runs, and there's also a lot of harnessed kids who seem to be involved in something other than scavenging for metal. Before we meet up with our company, we're going to double back and

[diary stops mid-sentence, interrupted by the sound of crunching metal in the junkyard]

* * *

Footnotes:  
1 Eggs rank right up there with mouse-traps/pest control as something that survival guides should probably talk about a lot more often than they do. No, the amount of nutrients or calories provided by a single egg is not great but it is pretty good compared to most things that can't run away when you try eating them, and if you have a steady supply (from a chicken coup, perhaps) then you can get a good bit of your dietary needs from that alone.

2\. We've all heard of poor people eating things like black pudding and chittlins in less queasy times, but it seems somewhat forgotten that animal brains, cooked and raw, were a pretty common part of traditional, poor-rural diets back when people either didn't know the risks, didn't think they mattered or were hungry enough not to care. Brain matter is still used by many modern hunters for tanning the hides of harvested animals, but nowadays there's a tendency for people to value the steaks and disregard the bones, marrow and organs, the exact opposite of what primitive hunters are thought to have done.


	24. Chapter 23: Hill People

_"Uh... strangers... I hate this. Do they want to share what they got or take what you got? Do you say 'hi' or do you blow them away?"_  
-Kevin Costner, the Postman

* * *

**18 October, 2011**  
**One mile south of Ranger, Georgia**

The squad cautiously picked their way through the tangle of rotting cars, quite a few of which had been there long enough for large trees to grow through them.

"Are you sure you really heard anything?" asked Lieutenant Ferreira

"I heard it." said Sarah Tagliabue assuredly. "Too big to be an animal, too small to be a spider, it..."

Sergeant Skitter had been standing on top of several old cars, stacked on top of each other like cordwood, when something gave way. He gave a scream and next thing he knew was up to his elbows in metal and moss.

"It sounded sort of like that, but not as loud... more like..."

Skitter quickly freed himself from the tangle, and then immediately dove into a nearby stand of bushes. He emerged with a dirty, screaming teenager in his arms.

"Thought you could trail us unnoticed, kid? I've been hearing you all afternoon, and smelling you since sunrise!"

"LET HIM GO, STOP!"

Another one burst from somewhere behind the trees, screaming at Skitter and holding a shotgun at port arms. The rest of the scouts raised their own weapons and trained them on the new threat.

"Hold your fire they're just children!" yelled Ferreira.

"C Company, 12th Regiment." announced Sergeant Skitter "We ain't looking for trouble. We just want to know who y'all are and why you've been following us."

"I'm Bailey, the one you just jumped is Andy. And we're not following anyone, we're just looking for food!"

"Looking for food, in a junkyard?" he asked.

"Hey, we found some twinkies in one of the caddies you fell through." she pulled several of the everlasting snacks from her pocket and tried to force a chuckle. "You can have one if you let my brother go."

Skitter realized that he still had the boy in a tight grapple. He sheepishly released him, and he scampered in the direction of his sister.

"Looks like you could use it more than us, no offense." said Ferreira. "Though if you would like to trade, our company has some fresh fruit on hand. Where are you staying?"

"South of here. Outside Fairmount, same as you." blurted Andy, getting a nervous glance from his younger sister.

"Oh, so you have been following us..."

* * *

***Diary Entry: 08:35, Wednesday, October 19, 2011***

Met some of the natives yesterday.

There were a lot of campgrounds and youth groups and homes for troubled children in this area and quite a few of their charges found themselves stranded in the North Georgia hills after civilization collapsed. Some joined onto the militias that went down to Atlanta, some became farm workers like most everyone in the area who didn't own a farm, some went marauder and I suppose that most of those are long dead... and then it looks like a few of them are hiding out in the woods, living off the land as best they can.

There's about a dozen of them, all teenagers or younger. Seem to be doing alright, even if they are a little lean and dirty... which I guess we are too. Sergeant Skitter and some of the others will go back to their camp in Fairmont to meet their leader and hopefully bring an emissary to C Company. My group will go on to Oakman as originally intended and then swing back to Hinton to let Captain Hall know what we've found here.

[Addendum: I didn't dare put my suspicion in writing at the time, but if the sudden appearance of so many harnessable humans in one place seems suspicious to you then you weren't the only one. We were still concerned about quislings and eyeworms, and at the time we thought the latter might be a successor to harnesses instead of a highly complex devise that can only be afforded to the most high-value assets. The "hill people" had heard of these things too and they were equally wary of us.]

We got in close to Ranger once it started getting dark. Still too well-lit and well-defended for the kind of inspection we would like to have, but there are some interesting things we noticed. They're installing what looks like giant fishtanks of some kind, and we glimpsed some kind of weird fleshy biomass growing on the inside... not unlike what we've seen on larger alien craft that we manage to shoot down. Impossible to say for sure, but we suspect this might be some kind of factory for either robots, aircraft or maybe something else. Perhaps they finally feel secure enough to start branching out from their towers and the big underground bases they've been said to be constructing. If so, we would do well to knock this place out of action before it goes on-line.

* * *

**18 October, 2011**  
**Near Ranger, Georgia**

"They were here," said Dwayne's tracker, looking at disturbed foliage on the edge of the junkyard. "missed them by a few hours at most."

"Missed a small chunk of them you mean; there couldn't have been more than a dozen in the whole group." Dwayne grabbed his hat and threw it to the ground in a huff. "Bastards took Highway 53 towards Jasper and we've been following a scouting party. They gave us the slip!"

"So what if they did?" asked Jack. "They'll rendezvous with the main force eventually so we can shadow them 'til then... and our bosses will have to appreciate knowing about that other group we found."

That appeared to be a tribe of mostly-teenage mountain-dwellers. One of his teams had found the footprints of small feet in homemade moccasins and followed them to their camp, where they found them breaking bread with a couple of the militiamen. They wasn't much else to do in the fading light, except report their findings to higher command and find a good place to camp out.

"Has our overlord gotten in touch with whoever owns the harnessing facility?" Dwayne asked.

"He has, and he has passably good relations with that one, it'll be willing to help us to whatever extent it can. Doesn't want feral warbands running around the edges of his territory any more than we do. The kids will be taken care for us if we can just locate the rest of that militia."

* * *

**19 October, 2011**  
**Hinton, Georgia**

Hinton was yet another quaint little mapdot-with-a-feed-mill-and-a-Dollar-General type of town, the locals directed C Company to a nursing home at the end of little gravel road, next door to a community centre, a Pentecostal church and a 200-year-old cemetery.

After a reasonably-uneventful passage through some very rough mountain country, the company was somewhat surprised to see civilization of some form still holding on in the west end of Pickens County. Conditions on the farms were so good that they lost a few members who hired themselves off to them, though they picked up an equal number who were eager for some "bug hunts" in the time before spring planting.

Captain Donald Kasparek was now a coordinator for many of the more active militia groups that still lingered in the area. He didn't usually travel so far from the Dahlonega area, but word of such a large and well-equipped unit passing through the area was something that required his attention; he was hoping he could enlist their help.

"One at the chicken plant outside Canton and they're building another one here, in Ranger." he said. "We'll hit them simultaneously, and we should be able to take them both. We would like to hit the ones in Gainsville and Cumming, but those are far too well-defended for anything I could pull together for use against them."

Captain Hall reviewed the map and other information he'd been given. There had been a spike of enemy raids and individual kidnappings over the last few weeks, and Kasparek thought that this would be the best way to put an end to it. Getting a suitable force to hit the facilities had been a Herculean effort; his position as one of the last remnants of organized government in North Georgia was much like that of a medieval lord haggling and pleading with his vassals for the slightest scrap of an offensive fighting force. He couldn't blame them; there was still a lot of work to do on the local farms, and the owners didn't like risking manpower even for the noblest of causes.

"My God... harness factories. We can't leave them standing, not if there's any chance at all of destroying them."

"I don't disagree," said Lieutenant Hall, "but there's going to be losses even if everything goes right. Everything goes wrong and it's a massacre on both fronts. Captain Kasparek , tell us more about these Palmetto Arms Cornflowers."

"They're a copy of the Russian 82mm Vasilek, an automatic mortar using four-round clips to give it a very impressive rate of sustained fire. Imagine a mix between a mortar, an autocannon, and a light field gun. Ours have been redesigned for easier transport by pack animals, and they're marginally useful against slow aircraft. You can of course keep the one that we're assigning to Ranger."

"Um, thank you." said Captain Hall, knowing exactly what the crafty mountain man had just done. "Well, I guess we really do have no choice but to turn around and help you capture that factory intact... you'll just level it with artillery if we don't."

"Yes. Yes I will."

* * *

***Diary Entry: 19:15, Wednesday, October 19, 2011***

We bagged a large jake turkey on the way home, but beyond that the trip was surprisingly uneventful. Got back in time for church service and we debriefed during the midweek war council.

The hill people, traveling on horseback, got there about the same time that we did, and we were pleasantly surprised to discover that one of them is a member of a unit we've often served with in the past, the Atmarga Column. She has an injured friend back at camp and they were separated from their unit, which is taking roughly the same route to the Carolinas that we are. Asked if they could come the rest of the way with us, and of course we agreed...

...but we're not going that way anymore, at least not just yet. When we reported the weird factory in Ranger, Captain Hall said he knew all about it already. It seems that a local militia commander has asked for his help in demolishing it... they use those facilities to harness captive children. In fact the Atmarga Column is being pressed into service to raid a chicken plant in Cherokee County. We'll get a medical taskforce to help with any harnessed kids we recover, our own screening force of cavalry, plus a very interesting form of heavy artillery, some kind of weird mortar-cannon which will hopefully only be used to fire smoke and not explosive shells. We attack at dawn, on the 21st.

* * *

***Diary Entry: 07:10, Thursday, October 20, 2011***

Had rain and thunder off and on all night, temperatures are down into the 40's today.

A large group of men arrived outside our perimeter last night. Their leader, Dwayne Allen, says that they're from a unit that got destroyed when the spiders stormed across the Etowah River. They're a very rough-looking group of people, but they've asked to join us and I'm sure Sergeant Skitter could find a use for them in the coming campaign.

That's the good news. The bad news came riding in on a mule in the form of one of the kids, bloodied and half-delirious. He says that a big force of Spiders ambushed and carried off most of his friends at dawn. No casualties, he doesn't think, but it's almost certain that they'll be taken to Ranger for harnessing.

I think our schedule just moved up a bit.


End file.
